ROM Properties "pop up time with zip/7z games"

[stoniemahonie]

With regard to editing the rom properties in the gamelist, when you right click a rom and then click "ROM Properties", with games having a somewhat significant size, lets say 50 MB, it takes around 4 seconds until the window opens where you can edit a rom. And if the size is smaller or bigger, the time it takes adjusts accordingly.

This happens to roms that are compressed with zip/7z, if the game is extracted, the window pops up instantly. I would like to ask why is that ? Does quickplay unpack it ? I can't see unpacked files in the designated "General Options->Emulator Options-> Uncompress to folder", but it does indicate that it unpacks it for whatever reason because when i actually start the game, i notice the delay because the unpacking takes a few seconds depending on the filesize. Thing is, sometimes i edit a bunch of entries and usually it's never noticable because games for systems like snes are very small. But with the NDS for example, it is very noticable. Would be nice if this could be looked into. I set the compression support in the "Emulator Management" to true and false and noticed no difference.

[butter100fly]

A compressed file is just a file. If you want to know anything about the contents of it, you have to engage the program that zipped it up or a tool that works with that program. You might get lucky and the zip might store all of the properties of every file inside it that you need in some kind of manifest that's part of the compression format it makes, or I guess it might make some kind of index that it can internally handle in the file format itself to get pointers to file info (that sounds tricky though), but you might not be lucky: 7zip maybe just doesn't expose all the properties of every file, requiring the file to be extracted. And you might have to deal with issues like solid archives: depending on how the files are 7zipped up, you might need to extract EVERY rom just to get some file property of one! Compressing files is always a tradeoff for convenience, you gain and lose by doing it! I'll sure look into this one day soon though, and let you know

[stoniemahonie]

I understand how compression works and thanks for the thoughtful explanation. I hope you don't misunderstand though, it is just when i right click in the gamelist on a random game that is in zip/7z format (open the context menu) and select "rom properties" from the bottom, then it takes the mentioned amount of time to open that window. So i don't understand why quickplay has to "look into the archive" when i only want to edit the name/language etc. in the gamelist (not in the file itself). I can also do this by left clicking into the gamelist directly, and there is no delay. It is not a problem at all, just that i noticed it. In the end, the data is just written in the corresponding ROMdata.dat that just points to the .zip/7z (or any other file extension) and not to the files inside them.