RomVault vs ClrMamePro

Hi,

I've used ClrMamePro for about 2 decades, and just started using RomVault, on and off and REALLY like the simplicity of RomVault. I've used RomVault for only about 2 years or so, and there is alot of quirks. I'm trying to build the Retro/Old DOS Collections and find it impossible to preserve empty directories or timestamps based on the DATs. RomVault can disable torrentzip, but no way of restoring timestamps to previously torrentzipped files from the DAT-timestamps. In theory a time-stamp-respecting torrentzipped program would still be Torrentzippped friendly if the dats contained timestamps. Preservationist would frown upon losing timestamps, I guess. I also tried carefully crafting ClrMamePro to treat archives/chds as files, and RomVault doesn't seems to work at all. Some DOS games have strange "protection" in them that checks file dates, or empty directories. Are there any solutions to such issues?

I'm also wondering what method do you use to store ROMs, I'm thinking of getting a used server with ALOT of memory and run TruNAS OpenZFS w/ Dedupe enabled (I believe it is block-based Dedupe). Has anyone tried Dedupe on the FileSystem-level, rather than the DAT-level. How efficient is the Dedupe? Has anyone tried the new preview "Fast Dedupe" of TrueNAS? 

I just don't want to waste hours, testing and find out it is a failure. Any help is greatly appreciated. I was on hiatus from RetroGaming for quite awhile and just started again after several years.

Thanks in advance...

I have my ROM-Server on a 20TB Western Digitial Drive, Win 11, decently fast computer.

You can torrentzip manually after making edits.

About your DOS issue, have you tried checking out eXoDOS ?

What a timely post.

Some DOS games have strange "protection" in them that checks file dates, or empty directories. Are there any solutions to such issues?

Not yet, but SoonTM. Keep your eye out in the RV Discord for the latest testing builds.

Has anyone tried Dedupe on the FileSystem-level, rather than the DAT-level. How efficient is the Dedupe?

Yes, but I don't personally. Using FS level compression like zstd is more common. Some people tack on dedupe on top of that if you have the resources to do so. Not sure how efficient it is. I use RomVault in a Windows 11 VM sitting on top of my unraid array with an XFS filesystem. I'm in the process of compressing a lot of archives to zstd zips.

 I use to love external USB or internal super-large drives, but they are very scary to use without some sort of RAID, as HDDs, especially spinners are very affordable, compared to SSDs ($$/TB).

I just wish the RomVault's TorrentZipping will respect the file dates within DAT files.

I'm playing with The DOS Collection v21 at the moment. Their DATs destroys empty directories & file dates.

exoDOS is next on my list...

 Thanks for the update on RomVault.

Yeah zstd had threading & large dictionaries. I think zstd zips do NOT support solid archives. I wish they'd update the zip specs to support solid zips. WinRAR 7.0 now support 64GB solid dictionary sizes. RAR also has the blake2sp crypto secure hash as an option since 5.0. I also wish the Zip specs gets updated with an option to add a cryptographically secure HASH to its extra fields, in addition to the collision-prone CRC-32. I remember a decade or so ago, a group had created alot of broken roms with same size & crc-32.

I'm referring to deduplicating already compressed archives. As ALOT of emulator sources from identical sources, mainly MAME/No-Intro/Redump. In theory, eg, storing a torrentzipped merged, non-merged, AND split set on a single ZFS Deduped Pool would only occupy about the same amount of space as a single merged set, as duplicate blocks are stored as pointers.

I really like the "Save full DAT" feature of RomVault. It creates a nice, clean single DAT tree of ROMs in RomRoot.

How do we go from RomRoot --> DatRoot. I want RomVault to create a single DAT tree from ROMs I copied to RomRoot?