Hi.
I apologize in advance for the topic because it is somewhat out of scope.
I am wondering if on occasion it is possible to just manually extract a ROM in zip format and re-compress it in 7zip format.
At the moment I know that the answer is: yes and no
I should give a specific example: I have a "Street Fighter II - The World Warrior (910522 World)" zipped ROM, and I want to extract it and compress it back with 7zip LZMA2 instead. Even though I did try several times with and without the exact same arguments that clrmamepro uses for 7z (a -y -r -ms=off -mx9 %1 %2), the resulting ROM archive never works with the emulator - bytesize comes very close, but that's about it.
Comparing both clrmamepro and manual 7z produced archive, one thing in particular stands out: the files archived with clrmamepro have various levels of LZMA2 compression while the one produced manually applies the same ratio to every single file within it. I can see that clrmamepro is issuing multiple compression commands (per file?) instead of a single one for all files, but since I don't understand fully how the process works I am still left with the question: having the same source rom files, is it possible to achieve the same resulting "working 7z archive" without using clrmamepro?
Obviously that if I want to process a full set or even a big number of ROMS I should not be doing manual work, but I still wonder if this can be achieved in individual instances or not; and if not, why?
Thanks in advance.