GoodMerge ROMsets

[cracksloth]

would it be possible to support GoodMerge ROMsets in a future version (or perhaps someone already knows of a way to get this to work)? for those who don't know it is basically just an automated organization of roms where clones and different dumps of the same game are combined in a single archive (7z, zip, etc). this not only provides good organization, but it also saves *a lot* of space. i have seen other frontends that have added support for GoodMerge but of course they suck in comparison to gameex. to clarify, all roms of a given game are contained within a single archive:

gamename.7z
   dumpname.rom
   dumpname2.rom
   dumpname_the_best_one.rom

i think the easiest method would be to treat gamename.7z as a folder if it contains more than one rom. is this possible somehow?

more info can be found here:

http://goodmerge.sourceforge.net/About.php

thanks for the great frontend, tom! i have been drooling over gameex for awhile and finally installed it yesterday!

-cracksloth

[EMKO]

no gameex doesnt support .7z this is because gammex would have to extract the game then load the emulator wich would take some time

almost all emulators dont support .7z

just extract all the games delete the ones u dont like and then zip them

doesnt it delete all the same data from the roms and keeps it on only one but when u extract it will put it back togheter

like all super mario world roms are almost the same but have a little diffrence like language

[cracksloth]

goodmerge supports 7z, rar, ace, and zip (but the most compression comes from using 7z). you are right, whenever making solid archives, you will get the best compression when archiving closely related the files (with similar data structure). that is why this tool is so beneficial from a compression point of view. rar and ace support solid archives i think but they have smaller dictionaries hence the compression is not as great.

although it would take a small amount of additional load time, i think the organization and compression far outweigh any negatives (my personal opinion). i also realize that not many emulators support 7z which is why it has so far only been supported by frontends.

if gamex were to support goodmerge, it would be the first htpc emulator frontend to do so. that is why i am pleading like a newb for support (there are no other options available).

if tom decides not to do let gameex extract roms from 7z files, perhaps there is a convoluted workaround which would require some scripting. i noticed in the emulator settings that gameex supports running a command both before and after launching the rom. here is my thought:

create a script that would mimic the folder hiearchy of the *.7z files with 0 byte files. there are many ways to do this. the most elegant would be a script that uses the commandline 7z tool to "list" the files and then use that output to create the structure. unfortunately, i am not gifted in any kind of code-ability. the second and less cool way would be to extract the entire contents and find a way to automatically replace each of the extracted roms with a 0 byte file of the same name. ultimately, using the example 7z above:

gamename.7z
  dumpname.rom
  dumpname2.rom
  dumpname_the_best_one.rom

would create a disk structure of:

gamename [FOLDER]
  dumpname.rom [FILE]
  dumpname2.rom [FILE]
  dumpname_the_best_one.rom [FILE]

then you would configure the gameex "launch before" to replace the fake romfile with the real one by extracting it with a commandline 7z utility. the "launch after" command would replace the rom with a 0 byte file by copying a template 0 byte file to the original location replacing the working rom (by naming it appropriately).

make sense? that being said, i am not capable of writing the script that would mimic the folder structure of the 7z archives. maybe someone else is interested? but i guess no one who uses goodmerge would be using gameex... i also would need a way to extract just the parent folder from the the [ROMPATH] supplied by gameex. does anyone else want to brainstorm with me? does anyone know of come commandline tools that may make this process easier? i am completely untalented.

-cracksloth