some noob questions

[mabu]

I am well versed in Mame and wanted to add SNES to my cabinet so I got zsnes... I have the emu installed and some roms to play with. I have a few questions:

* Does the system support compressed roms? I got a collection of roms in .7z format but to get them to load I had to un-compress them. Do you have to have all the roms uncompressed?

* I'm used to mame where it gathers information on all the roms - does zsnes do this? It seems I have to manually navigate to and load a specific rom in order to play a game. I can't imagine it's really that clunky...

* What's the best way to integrate this into a front end like MaLa?

* How well does this emulator work with the ArcadeVGA board and a standard arcade monitor from say, a NeoGeo machine? (I'm testing this on a PC before I move it to my cabinet).

[Joe Camacho]

I don't know about the other questions, but I can tell you zsnes supports compressed roms, just not .7zip compression.

[Deathlike2]

Zip files should be fine if you need compression.

[Gil_Hamilton]

* I'm used to mame where it gathers information on all the roms - does zsnes do this? It seems I have to manually navigate to and load a specific rom in order to play a game. I can't imagine it's really that clunky...

As opposed to forcing you to store all your ROM images in a single directory specified in an INI file that isn't editable from within the emulator, only being allowed to load games from the command line, and having to close the emulator to change games?


Yes, you have a fully-functional "load file" dialog in ZSNES.
Which is pretty standard fare for console emulators. I think MESS is the only major console emu that adheres to the MAME paradigm(No, NeoGeo emulators don't count, and you already know why).

If you REALLY want MAME-style behavior... ZSNES DOES support command-line game loading.
And if you want MAME frontend behavior, as opposed to MAME behavior... it remembers the last directory you used, so just store all your ROM images in one directory.

* What's the best way to integrate this into a front end like MaLa?

It should be fairly straightforward.
"ZSNESW.exe -L gamename.zip", .smc, or .whatever should do it.
File extensions matter.

For full MAME-ish behavior... I'm not sure. There's probably a command line switch to make escape kill the emulator instead of bringing up the GUI.

* How well does this emulator work with the ArcadeVGA board and a standard arcade monitor from say, a NeoGeo machine? (I'm testing this on a PC before I move it to my cabinet).

That I can't say.
Using the custom resolution option in ZSNES, I'd think you could get it going. But I don't really know how well it plays with lower resolutions(512*448 should be an optimum resolution, if I recall)

[mabu]

Does anyone know if it supports 7z files? I couldn't get it to work but I might not have been doing it right. The only way I could get it to load roms was if I had them uncompressed.

So what's the best way to integrate zsnes into a front end? Manually configure each and every game?

[Deathlike2]

ZSNES does not support 7z files. It should be obvious from past failure.

[mabu]

Do you all have any suggestions on how to automate the zipping up of a tree of subdirectories? If I unzip all the 7z files, I assume I can re-zip them into standard zip files, but that's a lot of work to do manually.

[creaothceann]

NSRT (link) can scan your ROMs, remove headers etc., compress them and put them into a directory structure of your choice.

[mabu]

That's awesome! Thanks! Hey, does anyone know if there is a similar utility for Visual Pinball files?

[escapee]

You can zip up files seperately with plain, old winrar. Select how many ever files, right click them -> 'add to archive'. 'Files' tab and check the box for them to be zipped seperately.