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1

clrmame Discussion / Re: [Feature Request] FreeARC support

« on: 20 February 2021, 19:29 »

First of all thanks for the kind reply. 

Of course I expected the ARC implementation to be a fairly marginal addendum to the project.
I would just ask you to put it on the list of "very cool albeit niche things" to do for the future, when time permits.

It would also open a new level of opportunity to those who have as a hobby witnessing, preservation and archiving, as well as playability.

(Propaganda mode ON) Think primarily of those who use or would like to make use of tape drives. There are already affordable Ultrium LTO-6 drives on the second-hand market today, I am confident that in a few years the same will be done with the 12 Terabyte LTO-8 tape drives. With a 3% recovery record, customizable on the command line, you would have the almost certainty of very long-term storage with scalable compression up to very high levels and vulnerable only in the event of a catastrophic scenario. (/ mode)

Once again thank you for all your work and I wish you much success in life and in all your wishes. 

2

clrmame Discussion / [Feature Request] FreeARC support

« on: 20 February 2021, 18:05 »

Good evening and a warm greeting to the whole community.

I have been interested in alternative compression algorithms for some time and have been very impressed with FreeARC.

It works in compression, with similar final result, at a practically double speed compared to 7Zip and in addition it offers the possibility to create recovery records. The compressor is command line avaible too, the decompressor is available both as an executable and as a dll.

In a few minutes, by modifying the options and the syntax of the compressor in the tab reserved for winrar.exe, I was able to get the Rebuilder to build ARC packages, without errors and readable by both FreeARC and PeaZip. With an alias I made sure that the packages had the right extension, .arc instead of .rar.

The problem is the decompression: the program targets unrar.dll and there is no way to make it see the arc archives as such. It is therefore not possible to scan the romset in arc. Could you add decompressor support for unarc.exe or unarc.dll? Using unarc.exe on the command line would be very convenient, as it is easy to use.

I think it would be enough to add a tab in the compressor options and give the possibility to write the desired syntax by hand. On cold backups I believe that the ARC format is of considerable interest especially for very heavy collections, it can be pushed in compression up to the levels of a ZPAQ, but with a considerable saving of time and in any case well beyond the capabilities of 7Zip.

Its weak point would be in the longer time required for decompression: a scan of a romset archived as arc would take longer than the 7zip or RAR equivalent.

Would it be conceivable to include this possibility in this wonderful Rom Manager?
Regardless of the answer or feasibility, a big thank you for the wonderful and constant work done over the years on this piece of software!

Ciao!