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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else surprised that the size of the ZIP is 42+ GB? I'm thinking these are pre-1990 games (i.e. Street Fighter 2 does not seem like abandonware just yet). Assuming a very generous average of 5MB per zipped ROM, that's 8,400 vintage arcade games in there.

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There are 28,740 roms in the zip file (all individually zipped, too). There's a large number of roms that are just regional versions of the same game -- US, Japanese, etc...

They're not all functional in MAME yet, and a lot of the (relatively) newer games require separate data files for sprites/videos/sounds. But yes, this is still a huge collection of classic games.

You'll find that over half those ROMs are not arcade games at all, but rather slot machines and video poker... and almost none of them are emulated. This huge explosion in the romset happened a few years ago, and personally, I feel shows the project might be getting off-course. I'd rather have playable emulation of the 3D games that came out 15 years ago!

Mame has support for later arcade machines, which have CD-ROM drives and hard drives.

Yeah, but those aren't in this archive. Those would be included in the CHD archives, which they also have on archive.org (for version 0.149) and each of those are 33-55 GBs

A good point and I would think that there's definitely going to be a lot of games there. Not all games are fully emulated by MAME however and so if a game does not have sounds emulated correctly then often .WAV files will be included of the sound effects and these will be played instead of actually emulating the sound chips. These WAV files can actually be pretty huge as people want to be as close to the original sounds as possible. Things like Dragons Lair (basically a large movie on a Laser Disk that requires you to do quick-time events to keep watching the movie) will probably also be adding a lot to the size.

While home consoles like the NES has very small game sizes (often just a handful of kb per room), I think arcade games tended to have a lot more space available for huge sprites and music.

I'm not sure about 5MB per zipped rom being very generous. From what I remember about MAME there were a lot of ROMs in the range below 100kB.

This doesn't include the Hard Drive images (CHD files) for the more recentish games where the rom was just a bootstrap to get to the game code on the disk.

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