[Resolved] Games in .zip forced to decompress with Mednafen standalone

First of all: Greetings, and thank You for the hard work!

I have a slightly annoying problem. I keep my PC Engine CD and PC-FX games in .zip files and use the Mednafen standalone emulator with both systems. Although it works perfectly, when launching the game from the ES frontend, the launcher always forces the games to decompress first. The Mednafen works perfectly with the games compressed when launching the app directly and opening them from there, so it's totaly pointless.
Is there any way to prevent this? The only solution I found would be replacing the emulatorLauncher.exe with the mednafen commandline in the es_systems.cfg, but that seems a little barbaric.

Hello,
Retrobat uncompresses zip/7z/squashfs for mednafen (ps, saturn, pcengine, supergrafx).

We know mednafen can run .zip but this requires cd.image_memcache setting.
Please read the documentation hereunder with regards to this setting (especially the caution part), which is why we use the unzip method which is safer.

Cache entire CD images in memory.
Reads the entire CD image(s) into memory at startup(which will cause a small delay). Can help obviate emulation hiccups due to emulated CD access. May cause more harm than good on low memory systems, systems with swap enabled, and/or when the disc images in question are on a fast SSD.

Caution: When using a 32-bit build of Mednafen on Windows or a 32-bit operating system, Mednafen may run out of address space(and error out, possibly in the middle of emulation) if this option is enabled when loading large disc sets(e.g. 3+ discs) via M3U files.

Hello!

Thank You for the fast response!

I understand why the decompression method is safer on some systems, but mine seems to handle it well and actually starts the games up (not that much) slower, so thats why I wanted to avoid it.

Anyway, Your answer gave me another idea. I ended up adding the .m3u file type to the extensions in BatGui, then created .m3u files with nothing more then the name of the .zip files. With this the games start without decompressing, althogh I have to create a .m3u for all of them. Tested it on 5 games so far and no problem. Will have to write a script for creating the .m3u files, but c'est la vie.

With this, I would say the problem is resolved. Thank You again!