MAME v147

[Harrison]

The MAME sets are coming now in 2 different sets, one is torrent zipped merged, the other one torrent zipped split, so you will have to update your existing sets to join (or just download them again, as they ar FREE).

The torrent zipped split set is the existing format, so you can join the set with your existing torrent zipped 0.146 set to update.

The new merged set is a torrent 7zipped set. This reduces the size of the set greatly. The 0.147 set for example is 42.54GB as the old format torrent zipped split version, and only 28.23GB for the new torrent 7zipped merged set, so a huge saving in both disk space and download bandwidth needed. You will need to download and install 7z though to support it.

From what I've read they are planning to move over completely to the new 7zip merged sets for future MAME releases, and possibly for other rom/iso sets too. The great news with this is that is will mean much small rom sets taking up less HDD space and needed much less bandwidth down download credit. The bad news is that you will either need to download the whole sets in the new format again from scratch, or waste time converting your old existing torrent zipped sets into the new 7z sets.

I'm also thinking that if you are tempted to download any PD torrents you don't currently have, it might be worth waiting until these have been converted to the new 7z format, as the download will be smaller, and you can seed and update them in future without having to mess around with CLRMAMEPro to convert them.

A word of warning regarding re-downloading the whole of MAME sets again. Apparently PD are not taking kindly to people doing this and are saying they might even put people's accounts into their shitlist if they do it, even if they have a high upload ratio! Personally I think that is out of order if you have a good ratio. They are viewing it as abuse of their [free] torrents, but if you seed back more of the [free] torrent than you downloaded I hope that is seen as OK by them. They can be over strict with their rules though so be careful.

For me, joining the torrents with the existing sets means I've not had to download much to bring the sets up to date each time, but I normally manage to seed the whole set back to the tracker each version, so I download only a few GB each version (depending on CHD changes), but manage to seed over 400GB. I'm hoping they see that as good standing to download both versions of the new sets, as I really don't have the time to rebuild them for 7z manually at the moment.