#24 MAME CHD and eboot PBP support

[eadmaster]

they are both compressed formats mostly used for games:
http://mamedev.org/source/src/lib/util/chd.h.html
http://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Eboot.PBP

CHD v5 supports combined compression with LZMA, Deflate, Huffman and FLAC (quite convenient!)
PBP uses Deflate compression only

[Henrik Stokseth]

I know of the PBP format. Its a binary image container format and as such not something you would use CDEmu for.

The CHD format is more interesting. At first glance it looks to be a harddisk image format.

[i30817]

CHD supports cd images too now. From what i can see it's used on mame pretty generally now that it merged with MESS and it's probably going to get more popular now that Retroarch is trying to support it (badly) and MAME is starting get into psx cd dumps territory.

[chd_support]

+1

I came here to make a feature request and found this one. I converted everything to chd and it would be nice to be able to mount those directly without having to extract them first.

[eadmaster]

little update on this: PBP can now probably considered obsolete, while CHD is getting a lot of support recently.

I suggest to take a look at this library for CHD read support.

[Silver Silverov]

+1 for CHD mount support, would be excellent addition to virtual cd/dvd software

[Jared B.]

I'll also throw my vote in for CHD support. It compresses better than XZ, compresses faster due to good multi-thread support, packs multiple tracks into a single file that's easier to handle, and is fully reversible back to the original format if needed. With dosbox-x now support CHD, I'm looking at converting all of my older PC games over to this format, and would be great to be able to mount them via cdemu when needed as well.

[Sam James]

xz does threaded compression and decompression nowadays.

[Jared B.]

indeed, thanks for the heads up. It'd been stuck with compress-only multi-threaded support for quite a while. Good to see they finally got support for decompression added in 5.4.