Why doesn MAME support RAR/7-Zip/xxxx compression?
ZIP is extremely well-supported through a free, cross-platform library, and has been a standard for at least a decade. Yes, there are many new up-and-coming compression algorithms that squeeze an extra few percent out of things, but they are generally (a) strictly coded for a particular platform, like 7-Zip (though this is apparently changing), or (b) proprietary, like RAR. Furthermore, what most people really fail to realize is that there is absolutely no incentive for the MAME developers to add support for another compression format. For one thing, it only makes the MAME core more complicated, dependent on more external libraries, and prone to bugs. But even beyond that, what is the real benefit of getting those extra few percentage points of compression? While we realize there are plenty of people out there who feel that life is not worthwhile unless they have an absolutely perfect, audited collection of ROMs on their machines, we honestly don’t see why MAME should bend over backwar
