Is it normal for PC Engine/TG16 CD games to take forever to load?

brimby · 4 Dec 2018, 03:39

Whenever I load one I have to sit there for 30 seconds before it boots up. Is that the standard experience with these games or is something not quite right in my setup? More info below.

I have the US bios and matched the checksum to the one listed at https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/PC-Engine

The roms are zipped chd files.

If I load a normal TG16 game they load fast, it's just the "CD" ones that are slow.

mitu · 4 Dec 2018, 04:36

@brimby No, that's not what I experience. What game are you running ? Does it happen if the game is in .cue/.bin format or just .chd ?

EDIT do you have your Chd files zipped again ? As @dudleydes pointed out, chd is already compressed, most likely RA first decompreses the zip in order to read the Chd, which is kind of pointless.

dudleydes · 4 Dec 2018, 09:38

@brimby Try running your files unzipped. chd is already a compressed format - it's what the "c" stands for - so there will be little savings in disk space by zipping them.

To test, launching the chd file for R-Type Complete CD in lr-beetle-pce-fast on my Pi 3 took about 10 seconds to reach the Irem splashscreen. When zipped, the same process took 45 seconds. The zipped file was about 150kB smaller than the unzipped chd file.

lostless · 5 Dec 2018, 05:16

@brimby Make sure that the bin file name matches the one in the cue file. Had the same issue as you

brimby · 5 Dec 2018, 22:55

@dudleydes you were right. I didn't realize chd are compressed. So I'm wondering now, do zipped files always take longer? I mean obviously not as long as these "double zipped" ones, but does an uncompressed sfc file, for instance, open a bit faster than a zipped sfc file?

mitu · 6 Dec 2018, 04:45

RetroArch will unzip the file before loading the content. For small archives, this time is negligible, so you probably don't notice it.

steptoe · 6 Dec 2018, 05:37

Unless your space is at an absolute premium, then I have all ROMs unzipped, except FBA and MAME as they MUST be kept zipped

Some emulators don't like zipped files unless a specific version of ZIP was used even if they do support ZIP archives, plus it lets you know if any archives were corrupted