Organizing Roms

[Kaoss626]

My Roms are taking up too much space on my hard drive. What I'd like to do is to organize them in some way.

One thing I noticed is that they are in many formats. While this would make no difference in playability, is there some way to convert them from one format to another? Is one format better than another? More compressable than another?

I figgure that once I get the basics like file format sorted out, I'll rename them with the basic name of the rom. Then use Good64 to rename them to their good names.

Once that is done I'll compress the files in some format. Is there one format that is better than another? zip? rar? ace? Though I figgure that most likely I will go with zip because PJ64 will automaticly unzip them to load them. Is 1964 capable of that?

Anyways thanks for your time, hopefully someone can help me out

 

[Allnatural]

What do you mean they are in "many formats"? If you're referring to byte order (generally indicated by the extension), there is no need for conversion, unless you intend to do some patching.

 

[Quvack]

as Allnatural said, theres not too much point in converting between the various formats, the emu will do all the converting you need. However if you want to you can swap it using a tool called Tool64.

Zip is the best compression format to compress your roms with, it wont give compression as high as rar or whatever, but its supported in practically every n64 emulator these days.

 

[Clements]

You have the option of compressing them with NTFS also (you can with Windows 2000 and XP). Saves hassle of zipping individual roms etc. although it is not compressed as much. The option is not available if you drive uses FAT32 though.

 

[The Khan Artist]

7-Zip compresses my ROM collection about 5% smaller than PowerArchiver, which is what I was previously using. Here's how I did it:

First, I converted all my ROMs to big-endian (z64) format using Tool64, just for the sake of consistancy, and then I renamed them with GoodN64.

Now, I go to a command prompt. I cd into the folder I have all my unzipped ROMs in and execute:

for %n in (*.z64) do 7zn a -tzip -mx=9 -mm=Deflate -mfb=64 -mpass=4 "D:\emulation\ROMs\N64\N64Ren\\%n.zip" "%n"

A few words of warning: All on one line. If you use Win95/98/ME, substitute 7z for 7zn. The double-backslash before the first %n is important. The 7-Zip folder must be in your path. The directory to save the zipped ROMs in (in this case, D:\emulation\ROMs\N64\N64Ren\) must exist before doing this.

After you execute that command, just wait a while (a long while, most likely,) and all your ROMs will be zipped up. You can delete the originals. The only problem is all your ZIPs will be named romname.z64.zip instead of romname.zip, but that is a minor annoyance.

If anybody knows how to squeeze a few extra drops of compression out of 7-Zip, without using BZip2 or Deflate64 (or how to get emulators to read BZip2/Deflate64-encoded zips), let me know!

 

[Hexidecimal]

or, you could go to www.7-zip.org and get the program

 

[The Khan Artist]

or, you could go to www.7-zip.org and get the program

Yeah, that's what I was talking about. The only problem is the GUI doesn't have a batch-zipping tool, and that is what my post was all about.

 

[Allnatural]

In an age of 200+ gig hard drives, is 5% really important? I just use plain zip via WinRAR. Clean and simple.

 

[Kaoss626]

Thanks for all your help

I've got them all converted to .z64 (mainly because 3/4 of them were z64 in the first place)

on my storage drive that I keep back ups of files I download and and Install files so I dont have to fumble with 100 CDs if I have to format and re-install, I saved about 500 Meg by using zip.

on my main drive (where I had all the same files that I use for day to day use) I went with the NTFS compression mainly because it was simpler and saved about 300 Meg.

Not overly impressive, but defintely worth the effort and it only took me an hour of time.

 

[The Khan Artist]

In an age of 200+ gig hard drives, is 5% really important? I just use plain zip via WinRAR. Clean and simple.

In an age where the most cost-effective removeable media is still only 700MB, yes.

 

[Doomulation]

In an age where the most cost-effective removeable media is still only 700MB, yes.

The most cost-effective media isn't 700 mb. DVDs are rather cheap today. And the burners are getting cheap, too. So...dvds are cost-effective & good burning media.