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sunlollyking · 2023-01-27, 19:55

Hey,

I've got a few chunky roms that are 7ziped or rar-ed even to save space. Currently when i select say a Playstation game it only offers some emulators that support a 7zip such as the commodore emulators. Is there a workaround here or is there functionality that could allow this to be the case.
Could even have something to associate a folder with a specific emulator to not have to choose each time?

Just a thought

**garbear** · 2023-01-28, 03:53

(2023-01-27, 19:55)sunlollyking Wrote: I've got a few chunky roms that are 7ziped or rar-ed even to save space.

Kodi supports browsing into compressed archives. Make sure you have the appropriate filesystem add-ons installed. Let me know if you need help getting these.

However, once you enter an archive, you're on what we call the "virtual filesystem" (VFS). This is also true for samba and NFS shares, really anything that's not a local path on your hard drive is handled by our VFS.

In order for a core to load from the VFS (and from within archives), it has to support libretro's VFS interface. You can see a list of cores here that support VFS here: https://kodi.wiki/view/Game_add-ons

If you want to use a core that doesn't support VFS, your only choice is to unzip the roms and place them on your local hard drive.

OmniBlade · 2023-03-20, 14:15

Does VFS also have to be flagged in the addon? It looks like GenesisPlusGX for example might have VFS support merged in in the libretro fork of it, but it isn't flagged in the addon to be able to use it in kodi? Is there an easy way I can check locally on a system? If I verify it works on that core I'll PR changing the flag in the addon to true.

**garbear** · 2023-03-20, 23:51

The chart on the wiki is actually incomplete, it only shows VFS support going from Kodi to the add-on. VFS can also go from the add-on to Kodi, and that's the work you saw in the GenesisPlusGX fork.

I suspect that GenesisPlusGX exposes a way to load cores via the "add-on to Kodi" VFS, because this is a much more modern VFS system that "Kodi to add-on". Once we understand how GenesisPlusGX uses the VFS, we can quickly switch Kodi over to the more modern VFS system.

Nanocar · 2023-06-18, 20:35

7z file can theoretical be up to 2^64 bytes in size (16 exabytes of total size of the archive), far exceeding current needs and capabilities of filesystems as currently implemented.