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Comment by Mindless2112 | Hacker News Reader

Why did they put them all in one giant zip file? I would love to participate in the BitTorrent swarm, but I'm not keeping a useless [1] 42 GB zip file around.

[1] Apart from using fuse-zip, but as far as I can tell, that doesn't work in Windows.

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It's unusual. Typically MAME collections are distributed with deterministic compression and using automatic managing tools, so people can stay up to date without re-downloading large amounts of good data. 40GB torrents tend to hash 4MB chunks at a time, while a ROM might be only 8KB-- there's a high probability of a chunk becoming invalid.

When someone updates to the next MAME version, they can download an "update" pack with only the ROMs that changed, and a tool will recompress them together with the old files so a torrent client can start seeding the new version immediately.

You can use zipview.php to view inside the zip:

https://ia601001.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/26/items/MA...

I'm sure they had their reasons releasing it as a giant zip file. If you want the individual file listings, you can find them here:

https://archive.org/download/MAME_0.151_ROMs/MAME_0.151_ROMs...

MAME supports zipped roms, they should have been each zipped separately...

They are zipped separately - and then those zips are zipped. I'm sure it made sense to someone.

It makes sense to people who don't use tar.

It makes torrent seeders go all-in, perhaps?

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