Possibility for opening .RAR'ed ADF files directly, as with .ZIP'ed ADFs
 

Hello, I'm new here.

As WinUAE can open Zipped ADF files directly, can WinUAE open RAR compressed ADF files? I know RAR provides some simple free unrar DLLs for that purpose alone...
http://www.rarlabs.com/rar_add.htm

If not, I would love to see such a feature in this excellent program.

Thanks.

I don't think the problem would be the implementation of adding a UnRAR features, the problem is how people use RAR's rather than ZIP's.

You only get the additional compression benefits of RARing ADF's if you RAR multiple titles together, especially in a ordered sequence with lot's of near-duplicates and alternate copies that share many bytes of data - e.g. Games (A).

These files are stored in a Solid Archive for the compression to really benefit - when the file is extracted it can take a while as it has to analyse all files stored before it. This can take a while.

So RAR's are mostly used for mass archiving of games, to say burn to CD.

If you have a PC fast enough to UnRAR single files from solid archives anyway, then no doubt you have the money to buy a hard disk to store them as zip's in the first place.

without getting technical because i'm not sure...but...

because .lha can be unrared but not unzipped, wouldn't that be of some benefit????

Any new feature is a benefit to someone, it is up to Toni to decide which are the features he thinks are most important for all, or which ones he likes the idea of coding next ;)

But with RAR/LHA support you then have to select which file you want from within the RAR/LHA that you want to mount in DFx:

With the speed issues and the fact that RAR's are only really used to distribute complete collections (e.g. TOSEC) or archive ADF collections for offline storage/backup I cannot see the point of implementing this feature.

LHA files cannot be 'unrared' or 'unzipped'. You are getting things mixed up. Just because WinRAR can extract the files it doesn't mean they are anything to do with it. WinRAR is just an archiving program, it SUPPORTS lots of formats. LHA files aren't related to RAR files at all.

i stand corrected;)

Thank you for your replies. Indeed I was referring to the TOSEC packs. I have Tosec 27 for games starting with B :) -- the pack rar'ed as one pack was 400 mb, but with each game individually zipped it came to 785 mb. I thought individual rar's would make a major difference, but after your explanatin I tried individual rars -- that made the pack come to 732 mb. Much better, but nowhere near 400 mb :)

So while the feature would be nice to have, I must admit it had now lost the point it originally had.