3 ms·

I remember when Nesticle and some of the other viable Nintendo Entertainment System emulators first started showing up. It took a while but eventually everybody

by bane 7y ago

I remember when Nesticle and some of the other viable Nintendo Entertainment System emulators first started showing up. It took a while but eventually everybody just ended up settling on the iNES format by Marat Fayzullin. This was a very useful thing. I've always found it extremely frustrating that later systems had so many competing formats for the roms as you inevitably end up with lots of duplicate games just so different emulators can handle them. It gets even worse for optical media with all the .cue file stuff and distributions that provide the audio tracks outside of the iso in half a dozen different formats. It's almost impossible to assemble a good collection for those kinds of systems. I honestly think a .zip based distribution makes a lot of sense since most emulators of cartridge based systems can open zipped archives and run the first compatible file they find in them. But all the rest of the information for the game could be "built in" to the zip. If you look at the Gamebase projects, there's plenty of hobbyists who are willing to pour thousands of hours into assembling games, metadata, manual scans and other such things into those kinds of projects...but they lack the ability to unify all that ephemera into a single archive per game. If such a thing were to become standard, I'm certain people/groups outside of the "established" database groups would begin to publish collections. I for one would definitely welcome a format with built-in cheats, patches and so on and would love to download a collection of say, Japanese RPGs that come with scanned manuals, translated manuals and can run the game in the original and patched versions....or to try out all the weird and wacky Mario/Sonic patched game variants. I just can't be bothered to go download each patch myself to try it out, but if they were already present in the .zip :) I think even support soundtracks would be awesome and could see people firing up collections of games just to listen to the music, without having to keep track of a separate soundtrack archive. I think this would be an even bigger benefit for modern optical media. The .bin/.cue stuff is honestly terrible. More than half the time I've ended up with a .bin or some kind of .something that I need to convert for some reason, or mount and extract stuff and then handbuild .cue files which don't work half the time. I don't even know if the problem is what I've downloaded, the .cue I made or the emulation compatibility. A standard distribution "format" that just solved all that would be incredibly useful.

near 7y ago
At some point, I want to talk about CDs as well. A proper CD archival format would include the lead-in sectors, with which it is absolutely trivial to extract track information from the Q-subchannel of it. Easier than parsing a CUE sheet, or MDF, or CCF, or whatever else have you. I do understand it's hard to rip this data from CDs (usually requires an older Plextor drive), but worst case, as bad as it'd be, generating the TOC from a CUE sheet is very simple, and if it's marked with a special entry to denote it being machine-generated, I feel that would be a good compromise. Then you'd have a single CD image format in a single file that captures all data on CDs. If you wanted to, you could then compress that image with either ZIP, or a custom-purpose tool that combines things like Reed-Solomon prediction, subchannel prediction, FLAC encoding for audio tracks, etc, resulting in images not any larger than ISO+FLAC. But well, https://xkcd.com/927 https://xkcd.com/927 and all, right? > I for one would definitely welcome a format with built-in cheats A thing I do with bsnes is bundle a database with most known cheat codes for all games, so you've got all the cheats nicely labeled and ready to go whenever you play a game. I kinda wish this idea caught on more for all the other systems and emulators, but it hasn't been all that popular.
- bane 7y ago
  I kind of think that part of the problem is that there needs to be a bit of a network effect here for these kinds of .zip packaged formats to take off: 1) An emulator of sufficient popularity has to fully support it. 2) The format has to provide some kind of benefit to the user such that they're willing to convert/duplicate their entire collection. 3) Somebody has to make and distribute collections of packaged roms that include enough extra stuff to make them worthwhile. To be honest, you might be in a good position w/r to #1 since your SNES emulator is now more or less the default in the community (at least for big multi emulation systems like retroarch). For #2, I think the benefit really derives from what's in the package: manuals, savestates, cheats, soundtracks, playthroughs (that you can jump to in the middle of), patches, variants, meta-data (publication info, credits, etc.) and so on could all be really interesting to lots of people, but really would rely on the emulator to take advantage of in some way. For #3, There's probably already enough information freely available to make a utility that would take somebody's existing ROM collection and yank down all the rest of the stuff from various websites all at once to build up an initial package of stuff. I kind of almost just think you should just go ahead and support something like this and have it slowly percolate through the community. If it achieve some kind of network effect it'll slowly replace the other formats in a de-facto way.

by bane 7y ago

near 7y ago

At some point, I want to talk about CDs as well. A proper CD archival format would include the lead-in sectors, with which it is absolutely trivial to extract track information from the Q-subchannel of it. Easier than parsing a CUE sheet, or MDF, or CCF, or whatever else have you. I do understand it's hard to rip this data from CDs (usually requires an older Plextor drive), but worst case, as bad as it'd be, generating the TOC from a CUE sheet is very simple, and if it's marked with a special entry to denote it being machine-generated, I feel that would be a good compromise. Then you'd have a single CD image format in a single file that captures all data on CDs. If you wanted to, you could then compress that image with either ZIP, or a custom-purpose tool that combines things like Reed-Solomon prediction, subchannel prediction, FLAC encoding for audio tracks, etc, resulting in images not any larger than ISO+FLAC. But well, https://xkcd.com/927 https://xkcd.com/927 and all, right? > I for one would definitely welcome a format with built-in cheats A thing I do with bsnes is bundle a database with most known cheat codes for all games, so you've got all the cheats nicely labeled and ready to go whenever you play a game. I kinda wish this idea caught on more for all the other systems and emulators, but it hasn't been all that popular.

bane 7y ago
I kind of think that part of the problem is that there needs to be a bit of a network effect here for these kinds of .zip packaged formats to take off: 1) An emulator of sufficient popularity has to fully support it. 2) The format has to provide some kind of benefit to the user such that they're willing to convert/duplicate their entire collection. 3) Somebody has to make and distribute collections of packaged roms that include enough extra stuff to make them worthwhile. To be honest, you might be in a good position w/r to #1 since your SNES emulator is now more or less the default in the community (at least for big multi emulation systems like retroarch). For #2, I think the benefit really derives from what's in the package: manuals, savestates, cheats, soundtracks, playthroughs (that you can jump to in the middle of), patches, variants, meta-data (publication info, credits, etc.) and so on could all be really interesting to lots of people, but really would rely on the emulator to take advantage of in some way. For #3, There's probably already enough information freely available to make a utility that would take somebody's existing ROM collection and yank down all the rest of the stuff from various websites all at once to build up an initial package of stuff. I kind of almost just think you should just go ahead and support something like this and have it slowly percolate through the community. If it achieve some kind of network effect it'll slowly replace the other formats in a de-facto way.