.7z or .zip

[Capt_Blackwood]

Hey there,

I'm going through my ROMS, sorting out and getting everything in order. I'm trying to narrow things and make it easy. 

I have files both .zip and .7z. Which is better?

I can keep both. I don't think RocketLauncher will have a heart attack.

 

What are your thoughts?

[Capt_Blackwood]

4 minutes ago, agent47 said:

7z will offer better compression (smaller file size) but zip is more widely supported by emulators in terms of loading the archives directly without the need to extract first. I keep just about everything in zip format because unless you're dealing with large file sizes like disc based systems the size difference between zip and 7z is negligible. Most of the disc based systems can also be converted to various compressed types that eliminate the extraction time, which can be quite long.

You can of course have a combo of zip/7z and RL will be fine, but you will likely need to enable 7z for those systems since most emus can't load 7z archives directly.

Cool. Thanks for the reply. 

Brings me to another thought. Can I (or should I) activate 7z globally, or is it better to do it on a system to system basis?

[Capt_Blackwood]

Awesome. I'll keep that in mind when I'm going through my systems. Thank you.

[Styphelus]

Use RAR5. Better compression and much faster decompression than 7z. There were several discussion here in these forum about a year ago and speed and compression tests done and RAR5 was the clear winner. I converted most of my roms to it. Mame is still in the default zip format I think.