Topic: FBN unzipped roms support

[player987386]

Hi, wish you all a nice 2025! 

Is there a way to use FBN with unzipped roms? Like, unzip pacman.zip to a subfolder roms/arcade/pacman?

I know MAME can run games this way but I can't do it in FBN. Didn't found any info on Google but I may wording it wrongly. On this forum, I found an old thread, but the OP wanted it for different reasons than mine (rom hacking).


Thanks!

[barbudreadmon]

No you can't.
Why would you want this ? Not only you'd be wasting a lot of disk space but verifying/rebuilding romsets with clrmamepro would be impossible.

Edit : oh wait, are you the one who wants this for rom hacking ? or is it the guy from the old thread ?

[player987386]

No you can't.
Why would you want this ? Not only you'd be wasting a lot of disk space but verifying/rebuilding romsets with clrmamepro would be impossible.

Edit : oh wait, are you the one who wants this for rom hacking ? or is it the guy from the old thread ?

Yeah, I'm the one doing the hacks! 

I asked because, as it is, I must work the hack in MAME/debugger and copy the modified files to the zipped romset. Not much a trouble but it would be good if I could set the same game folder for both emulators (FBN suits better to my workflow)

Anyway, thanks for the reply. Here's the old thread, the OP was concerned the zipped roms could be bad for his SSD.

https://neo-source.com/index.php?topic=2916

[dink]

Yeah, I'm the one doing the hacks! 

I asked because, as it is, I must work the hack in MAME/debugger and copy the modified files to the zipped romset. Not much a trouble but it would be good if I could set the same game folder for both emulators (FBN suits better to my workflow)

Anyway, thanks for the reply. Here's the old thread, the OP was concerned the zipped roms could be bad for his SSD.

https://neo-source.com/index.php?topic=2916

Quote from message in the link, above:
"Now, a concern for me is the romloading, with a zipped romset it gets unpacked on the fly every time you start the game. If you are using flashmedia like an SSD, unzipped sets would be preferred since it reduces wear & tear and being wasteful with ressources is bad."

dink's response:
This is a completely false claim.  The zipped romset/files are unzipped in memory, and their unzipped contents never touch the filesystem when using FBNeo (or FBAlpha, back then when the person wrote the message in 2016 or thereabouts).

best regards,
- dink

[Robert]

Yeah I thought statement was crap. I do heaps of mame compiles on my SSD, and after years of that it's as healthy as can be.

[player987386]

Interesting info. I think there's some exaggeration about SSD life expectancy.

Anyway it's not a bad idea to have regular backups of files and OS images.