After being the one asking for BJWFlate to be posted since it produced such excellent compression (at the cost of processor time to compress), now I find that roms within my .79 set have been corrupted by BJWFlate!

I wanted to post this to let others know *NOT* to use this unless you plan on *MANUALLY* loading each and every game, because the problem DOES NOT appear in a Mame audit, a WinZip test nor even a CLRMamePro scan... All the roms test and audit okay, it's just that MAME cannot handle loading certain files within them when requested to start a game.

Others can verify this with the "bublbobl.zip" game. (I used merged roms if that makes a difference)

Load up boblbobl, make sure MAME can play it. Now rezip the rom using BJWFlate. I used this command line (it's pretty fast compared to the default setting):

packer-exe-1 = bjwflate.exe
packer-cmd-1 = -a -n -s64 -r -y %1 %2

Now reload the game. Mame will refuse to load it and show this error:

a78-05.52 NOT FOUND

Yet testing the zip with PKUNZIP -t (or CLRMamePro or Mame audit) succeeds:

OK 65536 DeflatX 27749 58% 02-01-04 07:08 53f4bc6e --w- a78-05.52


Therefore DO NOT USE BJWFlate if you want to use the game roms. I don't know how many more roms it affected, but this was the first one and a more popular one.

Perhaps this is just a bug in MAME core, but my guess is that getting Mame to fix whatever added in zip util is not going to happen just to support a very little used ZIP app? But if anyone is a MameDev and wants to look into this, all the better.