when to unzip?

[Shivian]

Im new to Hyperspin and i have been trying to understand when to unzip things. Some of the tutorials i see people using Zipped Roms and Unzipped/rar Roms.

I have 7z setup but my roms that are zipped still do not show.

Are there any small complete setups that are for testing and learning? Just to see something working and to compare back to?

Thanks.

[32assassin]

very few emulator supports 7z, what Hyperlaunch does for you is:

- unzipp the rom

-place it in a temp folder

- load the rom from a temp folder.

depending on your system, you might see a lag time in loading. No matter what PC you have you will see a lag with systems such as PS2, WII and other large Disc images.

Emulators such as MAME, Project64, Nestopia, MESS and many others can load roms that have been Zipped, not sure about 7z. With no lag time.

Long story short it depends on the emulator, and on you. IF you want to save drive space and deal with long loading times. 7z your roms.

if you want fast load times, and are willing to give up a large amount of drive space to a single rom file, Dont 7z your roms.

[damageinc86]

I have mame and all the cartridge systems zipped. i think the atari systems might be unzipped, but i mean,...that's like kilobytes we're worrying about there lol.

I don't want to tax my system and have longer load times by zipping disc-based systems, so I have all the iso's and stuff unzipped. Storage space isn't hard to come by nowadays so it's not a problem.

[Shivian]

Thanks guys that explains a lot.

whats mostly supported? if not 7z?

[Fromlostdays]

The only system I'm aware of that seems to require unzipped roms is Commodore 64 as per DJVJ's module notes. However, I used drizzlezip to 7zip every one of my roms for every system and then have hyperlaunch unzip and launch and I've never had any problems even with the commodore, so this really is personal preference. If you're looking for compatability with emulators I think the ones that support archived roms mostly do so with the .zip format. I THINK RetroArch might support 7zip archives at least with some of its cores. But, to me, none of that really matters because for any system that doesn't support the zips just enable 7zip support in HyperlaunchHQ. Lastly, you may in some cases have to add the zip and/or 7z extensions to the emulator options in HyperlaunchHQ in order for them to work and be seen in the audit.

IMPORTANT EDIT: I forgot to mention the only roms I leave in zipped format are MAME. Don't 7zip those, and don't enable 7zip support in HQ either. Leave those as .zip, for Mame and all of its system derivatives (aae, neo geo, classics etc)

Edit edit:

open hyperlaunchHQ

Go to Global (on the left where the systems are listed, should be at the top)

Click on the "Emulators" tab.

Find the emulator you're trying to use

Click on it

Under "extensions" add "zip|7z" no quotes if it isn't there already, and your roms are in either of those formats. (This is where the extensions of the archive AND the rom must be listed or you will not be able to launch or audit. Example Super Mario World (USA).zip inside of which is Super Mario World (USA).smc. Both zip and smc must be listed in your rom extensions and seperated by the bar | (type this using Shift+\) So your extensions for super nintendo might look like: zip|7z|smc|sfc etc.

Click on your system and redo audit.

[albert_c]

The only time you should unzip is when the zip file is compressing a CD, DVD, or other optical storage image. Reason being is that while you save storage space if you play a file from the compressed format, some emulators simply take forever to load a compressed disc image because those compressed images have to be uncompressed the disc image to memory before they are loaded. Although, some emulators handle compressed disc images just fine, so you will have to experiment just a bit once you get to setting up an optical storage based system (i.e. Saturn, PSX, Dreamcast, PS2, etc.)

MAME and all your cartridge based systems, leave the roms in compressed format.

Optical disc based systems, it behooves you in most cases to unzip the compressed roms to disc image.