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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

by 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 near 7y ago

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.