2022-10-26, 22:07
Most of my roms for various consoles are compressed using either zip or 7za. Since I run Kodi on a limited SD Card space does become an issue. A lot of the older roms support high compression rates, allowing savings of about 50% space. Even some cd based iso based roms save upward of 25%.
I was wondering if we can utilize special file extensions for all compressed rom handling. For example if an Nintendo NES rom is zipped, the file is named StickFighter.nes and its zipped as StickFighter.nes_zip or StickFighter.nes_7za, Kodi/Retroplayer, would use the default ".nes" handler but first uncompress the first nes file in that archive.
Similarly for SNES: StickFighter.smc_zip, StickFighter.sfc_7za
Nintendo 64: StickFighter.z64_zip or StickFighter.z64_7za
"ISO" based roms: StickFighter.iso_zip
... and so on.
It will first have to uncompress the archive to a temporary location and then play that file. It will only unzip the first file with the given extension in the compressed archive. This way, if my compressed nes rom is named StickFighter.nes_zip, but the nes file inside the archive is named StickFighter (U).nes, it wont have any issues. This will allow renaming the archive without worrying about rom inside the archive. Also, instead of uncompressing the entire archive, it will only uncompress the FIRST file with that extension. After playing the archived rom, the extracted rom can be deleted from the temporary location.
I was thinking using double extensions like StickFighter.sfc.zip, but the semantic for that is generally used for other purposes outside of Kodi's ecosystem.
I was wondering if we can utilize special file extensions for all compressed rom handling. For example if an Nintendo NES rom is zipped, the file is named StickFighter.nes and its zipped as StickFighter.nes_zip or StickFighter.nes_7za, Kodi/Retroplayer, would use the default ".nes" handler but first uncompress the first nes file in that archive.
Similarly for SNES: StickFighter.smc_zip, StickFighter.sfc_7za
Nintendo 64: StickFighter.z64_zip or StickFighter.z64_7za
"ISO" based roms: StickFighter.iso_zip
... and so on.
It will first have to uncompress the archive to a temporary location and then play that file. It will only unzip the first file with the given extension in the compressed archive. This way, if my compressed nes rom is named StickFighter.nes_zip, but the nes file inside the archive is named StickFighter (U).nes, it wont have any issues. This will allow renaming the archive without worrying about rom inside the archive. Also, instead of uncompressing the entire archive, it will only uncompress the FIRST file with that extension. After playing the archived rom, the extracted rom can be deleted from the temporary location.
I was thinking using double extensions like StickFighter.sfc.zip, but the semantic for that is generally used for other purposes outside of Kodi's ecosystem.
