NES/SNES rom compression

[DBG]

I feel kind of foolish for asking this question, because it seems like something I have done before, but here it is anyways (thank you ahead of time to the person[s] that offer a helpful reply). I have unzipped nes & snes roms I'd like to audit + zip. I was almost 100% sure that GoodTools had the ability to do both, but so far I've only been able to audit the roms, not have them auto-zipped afterwards. I know I'm probably just missing a simple option, so any help would be nice. I also promise to get some sleep soon to prevent future posts like this <img src=smilies/thumb.gif>.

<P ID="signature"></P>

[iapetus]

[url]http://goodmerge.kiczek.com/About.php[/url]


<P ID="signature"></P>

[Narvick]

Yep, GoodMerge was made specifically for that reason, it's basically a complementary program that doesn't audit, but can archive and compress ROMs in a variety of ways.

<P ID="signature">!</P>

[DBG]

Great program, I am going to try it... from looking at settings it seems to want to put different copies of games into one zip instead of in a zip of it's own for each file (what I'd like to do), but I'll figure it out =p. Thanks again!

<P ID="signature"></P>

[DBG]

http://www.zophar.net/utilities/multisysaud.html <= I found a lot of great rom zipping tools on this page, I don't mind having audit + zipping in different steps as long as both are auto. Thx again all.

<P ID="signature"></P>

[Turtle]

Almost any general compression tool can zip multiple files into individual archives. I would recommend WinRAR which is one of the best general purpose compression utilities that exists for Windows. You just highlight all of the files you want to compress, then right click and hit Add To Archive. On the options screen, choose if you want .zip or .rar (.rar will be smaller, though many emulators (and the Good Tools) can handle autoextracting ROMs from .zips) and then go to the Files tab and check "Put each file in a seperate archive". This will zip each file into a seperate archive with the same name as the original ROM (with a different extension, obviously.) The rest of the options can be left at the default settings, though I usually change the Compression Method to 'Best' instead of 'Normal'. It takes longer to complete the process but the final result is smaller files.

Also, while you'll probably want to audit the ROMs first so that you can have them properly renamed, Good Tools can also audit zip files. So if you download a bunch of ROMs in .zip form, it's not actually necessary to unzip them, audit and rezip them.

<P ID="signature"></P>

[The 9th Sage]

> Also, while you'll probably want to audit the ROMs first so
> that you can have them properly renamed, Good Tools can also
> audit zip files. So if you download a bunch of ROMs in .zip
> form, it's not actually necessary to unzip them, audit and
> rezip them.

Although, for archiving, if you don't mind putting the things in one archive, a single solid RAR archive is king. If you're gonna rezip them anyway, you may as well get the benefit of having the solid compression on. Basically this analyzes all the files taking out bits common to all of them, in some cases this greatly increses compression, like with SPC files.

<P ID="signature">http://www.xanga.com/ZeldaDD</a></P>