Hacking EZ-Trim+

TrolleyDave

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161ynt0.jpg


V0.11 Released!
--------------------
+ Added faster file copying routines.
+ Add Show Status Log button.

EZ-Trim+
======
A simple to use lightning fast NDS ROM trimmer and renamer. Simply select the roms you want trimmed/renamed and select Trim, Rename or Trim + Rename depending on what you want to do and that's it! When trimming a rom the program checks to see if a WiFi block exists in the file and if one is found the program keeps it intact.
You can select the style of the filename you want to produce easily simply by selecting checkboxes. The trimmer can either overwrite the original NDS file or create a new file with the extension _trim in the original folder. You can also select a different output folder for the trimmed roms.
Roms kept inside archives (.zip, .rar, .7z) can also be extracted and then trimmed or renamed (or both!). Although it renames the archive file there's no option for repacking it with the trimmed rom but if there's enough call for it I'll put it in.
The renamer will only work for roms that have details stored in the release database. You have to download this manually by clicking on the button located in the renamer options. It doesn't do it automatcally in case you're using the trimmer on a machine not connected to the internet.
To find out what the different checkboxes do simply hover the mouse over it for a second or so and a hint will pop up.

SPEEDS
---------
The trimmer is a mighty fast beast depending on how your options are set. Below is a rough guide to getting the best speed out of it.

Unpacked NDS files : To get the best speeds out of it keep all your roms unpacked (with the extension .NDS) and select the permanent trim option. Select the files you want trimmed +/or renamed, select the process you want and watch it fly. On my crappy old computer with crappy old hard drives using the permanent trim opton I trimmed and renamed 250 unpacked roms totalling 4 gig in around 5 or 6 seconds. The permanent trim option only affects unpacked roms with no custom output folder selected.

Zip/Rar/.7z files : The program unpacks these pretty quickly but unpacking can take a few seconds. Once the program has unpacked the rom it trims it just as quickly as a normal NDS file. If you choose to output the trimmed file to another drive it has to copy it to the other drive, if you use the default path or your custom path is set to the same drive it'll move the file to the folder instantly - meaning it only takes the time it takes to unpack the rom to trim it.

The trimmer will be slowest when your roms and/or custom output path is different to the one the program is stored on.

RENAMING
-------------
When renaming plain NDS files the trimmer will look for a .SAV file matching the old name in the same folder and rename it accordingly. When renaming archives the trimmer will look for a .SAV file inside the archive and rename that accordingly.

Renaming will only work when the details for the game can be found in the release list. To update the release list use the button located in the lower right corner of the renaming options.

MISC
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To change the background images simply drop an image file onto any of the panels or the main window itself.

DDWNLOADS
=========
Simply unpack the archive to the folder of your choice and double click on the program to start, the program does not use an installer.

Download from my blog here...
 

TrolleyDave

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It's just a first release beta at the moment so I didn't do alot of work on it's looks. If people use it and want it improved I'll keep working on it.
 

TrolleyDave

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Cool! What was your nick on the old R4 forums? I let EZ-Trim become redundant because other trimmers came out that were much faster and I figured everyone had migrated to one of them. There aren't too many quick renamers around though so I thouught I'd write one and then figured I might as well include a trimmer as well and turned it into EZ-Trim+.

It's not quite as easy to use as the first one but it's easy enough!
 

Gore

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Total size of files untrimmed = 2320.00MB (2432696320 bytes)
Total size of files trimmed = 1989.94MB (2086603403 bytes)
Total of space saved = 330.06MB (346092917 bytes)

Damnnn, if this didn't mess up anything on here... damnnnn

These were all already trimmed by NDSTokyoTrim.

Oh crap, I don't have copies of any of these ROMs..
This won't mess anything up, will it? Roms aren't as easy to get today as they were yesterday..
 

TrolleyDave

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Nope they should be totally fine. I don't know why it's come up ith such a huge difference. All the roms I tested ran perfectly after trimming.

EDIT: Duh me! As soon as i posted I realized what it was. It doesn't count the amount of data it actually trims, it just totals up figures from the header.
 

TheMute

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Ooo! EZTrim is back? Is this the one that you drag it into it and then it rims it and puts it in the TRIMMED folder? I remember downloading it from the old R4 forums and am currently still using it for my roms cuz I'm too lazy to search for better trimmers. But I'm thinking about changing rom trimmers... unless this one measures up...

EDIT:
So I just tried out several rom trimmers... skinnyrom, DS-X manager, NDSTokyoTrim, and EZ-Trim+, and I really like EZ-Trim+ the best! Mostly because I'm really stupid and couldn't get the others to work.... I really like how when I chose a .zip folder, after it unpacked it and found a .rar file inside, it started unpacking that too. Cuz I think skinnyrom just unpacked the .zip folder once, and if it couldn't find any .nds files in that folder, it stopped searching and unpacking. All the other 3 I tried maybe could have done what yours have done but I didn't want to read any FAQs or help texts to figure it out... This was just so easy to use!

Interface-wise, I think it's fine. ROM trimmers don't hafta be flashy... The window size is adjustable, but it doesn't stay that way. Like, every time I open it, it takes up most of my screen. When I make it smaller, close it, reopen it, it goes back to the original huge size. It just seems like there's a lot of empty space... I doubt anyone will have as many as many .zip files as in the screenshot in the 1st post... but maybe.

Maybe it's only my computer, but it opens up with the right half off the screen so I can't see the words "Separator" and "Options" (in Trimming Options and Renaming Options). Usually, I'd be okay with that since I usually download my .zip files and roms onto the desktop and I could just drag and drop, but this program doesn't use drag and drop any more but scans folders.

One change I would think to be convenient is upgrading your Renaming Options. It would be nice to have an option so that you yourself could rename it to whatever you want (unless you can already do that...). Cuz personally, I could care less about the release number, country code, and language content and don't usually put that in my roms' names, but that's just me.
 

TrolleyDave

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Ooo! EZTrim is back? Is this the one that you drag it into it and then it rims it and puts it in the TRIMMED folder? I remember downloading it from the old R4 forums and am currently still using it for my roms cuz I'm too lazy to search for better trimmers. But I'm thinking about changing rom trimmers... unless this one measures up...

EDIT:
So I just tried out several rom trimmers... skinnyrom, DS-X manager, NDSTokyoTrim, and EZ-Trim+, and I really like EZ-Trim+ the best! Mostly because I'm really stupid and couldn't get the others to work.... I really like how when I chose a .zip folder, after it unpacked it and found a .rar file inside, it started unpacking that too. Cuz I think skinnyrom just unpacked the .zip folder once, and if it couldn't find any .nds files in that folder, it stopped searching and unpacking. All the other 3 I tried maybe could have done what yours have done but I didn't want to read any FAQs or help texts to figure it out... This was just so easy to use!

Interface-wise, I think it's fine. ROM trimmers don't hafta be flashy... The window size is adjustable, but it doesn't stay that way. Like, every time I open it, it takes up most of my screen. When I make it smaller, close it, reopen it, it goes back to the original huge size. It just seems like there's a lot of empty space... I doubt anyone will have as many as many .zip files as in the screenshot in the 1st post... but maybe.

Maybe it's only my computer, but it opens up with the right half off the screen so I can't see the words "Separator" and "Options" (in Trimming Options and Renaming Options). Usually, I'd be okay with that since I usually download my .zip files and roms onto the desktop and I could just drag and drop, but this program doesn't use drag and drop any more but scans folders.

One change I would think to be convenient is upgrading your Renaming Options. It would be nice to have an option so that you yourself could rename it to whatever you want (unless you can already do that...). Cuz personally, I could care less about the release number, country code, and language content and don't usually put that in my roms' names, but that's just me.

Alright mate! What was your nick on the old R4 forums? We probably spoke at some point if you used EZ-Trim.

Thanks for the feedback on the app as well, it's most appreciated. According to the FTP server I've had 600 downloads and you're the first to mention anything at all!

I agree about a trimmers interface not needing to be too flashy. I'll work on the window keeping it's size tonight or tomorrow and upload it. I really didn't bother with anything like that cos like I said I was really just seeing if anybody would want to use it and to get a bit of feedback on the trimming speeds and ease of use. Now that I know someone is interested I'll do a bit more work on. The window sizing thing should be pretty simple it's just findin a little bit of time at the mo.

I was thinking of putting drag and drop back in as I reckon it's alot quiker and easier than picking from a file list, especially if you've got alot of files.

Can you send me snapshot of your screen with the right half blocked? What resolution is your screen set to?

What kind of options should I put into the renamer? There's already a way to use just the name, just untick all the boxes. Now that you mention though a little checkbox with "Just use name" would probably be a bit more intuitive. Any suggestions you've got hit me with!

What did you think of the trimming speeds?
 

TheMute

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I was TheMute as well, but I rarely posted. I mainly used the old R4 forums to find help and useful homebrews. And then I found about gbatemp and gbatmw...

Resolution 1024x768
http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/4355/16442906nz0.jpg

Drag and Drop would be useful again, especially for people who don't know how to navigate those kind of menus...

As for renaming options... like you know how when you download a rom it has like a weird name, like when I download Bomberman DS for Europe the .nds file is called trm-beur.nds. After I extract it, I usually just click the name and rename it "Bomberman" not even including the DS part. It'd be nice if that was integrated into EZ-Trim+ so I don't have trim it AND go to its folder, click the rom, and rename it.

The speed is fine. Compared to the old EZ-Trim, it's much improved. I can't really say it's fast mostly because I hav't compared it to other trimmers (mainly because I don't know how to work the others), but it's fast enough for my standards. Only a few seconds to both unpack and trim roms.
 

matriculated

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Why is it too bad? Sometimes it can take a day or so for the offlinelist dat to be updated.

I use a batch file from No-intro to 7zip my games according to their parent-clone relationship. It basically 7zips a game with it's respective regions to save space. If a release number is wrong (as they frequently are) the archive is screwed up. I can save well over half the space that zip archives take up using this batch file. I hate using clrmampro so that's why I was asking.
 

myuusmeow

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I was myuusmeow back on the old forums. I think I said "thanks for saving me 600mB" a few days before the place went down.
tongue.gif


QUOTE said:
As for renaming options... like you know how when you download a rom it has like a weird name, like when I download Bomberman DS for Europe the .nds file is called trm-beur.nds. After I extract it, I usually just click the name and rename it "Bomberman" not even including the DS part. It'd be nice if that was integrated into EZ-Trim+ so I don't have trim it AND go to its folder, click the rom, and rename it.

This is possible with a database of all NDS ROMs, but it won't work with new ROMs until that database is updated, depending on how fast you acquire your ROMs, the database may not be updated, so it can't rename it.
 

TrolleyDave

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I was TheMute as well, but I rarely posted. I mainly used the old R4 forums to find help and useful homebrews. And then I found about gbatemp and gbatmw...

Resolution 1024x768
http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/4355/16442906nz0.jpg

Drag and Drop would be useful again, especially for people who don't know how to navigate those kind of menus...

As for renaming options... like you know how when you download a rom it has like a weird name, like when I download Bomberman DS for Europe the .nds file is called trm-beur.nds. After I extract it, I usually just click the name and rename it "Bomberman" not even including the DS part. It'd be nice if that was integrated into EZ-Trim+ so I don't have trim it AND go to its folder, click the rom, and rename it.

The speed is fine. Compared to the old EZ-Trim, it's much improved. I can't really say it's fast mostly because I hav't compared it to other trimmers (mainly because I don't know how to work the others), but it's fast enough for my standards. Only a few seconds to both unpack and trim roms.

Wow, the wndow is waaaay too large. I'll fix that his weekend. I'll start it smallish and store the window size when it's closed. I'll try and add a manual rename option into it as well. I have to add a button for it and then after you type in the preferred name I'll store it in a database so that the next time you unpack it it keeps the name (because of it not renaming inside the zip files). How would you prefer it to work?

I'm not really too concerned about how the trimming speeds are compared to the other trimmers really, just whether or not it's faster than my previous attempts!
wink.gif
Glad it's much improved. You can never really tell when you're coding whether it's just you being hopeful that it's alot faster or whether it is alot faster!
wink.gif
A few seconds for an unpack and trim is good enough for me as well! I might be able to improve the speed but I don't really think it'll make that much more difference now unless there's some technique that I'm just not seeing. Plus the way I see it really is that if you don't have a couple of seconds to unpack and trim a rom you probably don't have time to play the actual game! lol
 

TrolleyDave

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I was myuusmeow back on the old forums. I think I said "thanks for saving me 600mB" a few days before the place went down.
tongue.gif


QUOTE said:
As for renaming options... like you know how when you download a rom it has like a weird name, like when I download Bomberman DS for Europe the .nds file is called trm-beur.nds. After I extract it, I usually just click the name and rename it "Bomberman" not even including the DS part. It'd be nice if that was integrated into EZ-Trim+ so I don't have trim it AND go to its folder, click the rom, and rename it.

This is possible with a database of all NDS ROMs, but it won't work with new ROMs until that database is updated, depending on how fast you acquire your ROMs, the database may not be updated, so it can't rename it.

It's a manual rename option he's looking for though so even if the game isn't in the release list yet it should work. I could just store whatever name is chosen in another database and when it unpacks the NDS file rename it to that.
 

TheMute

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Yes, a manual rename option would be perfect. Just have like a text field/box and the trimmed file's name would be replaced with whatever is in the text field/box. However, I would think this would cause some complications if someone trims more than one rom... So only make it an option when there's only 1 rom being trimmed or something? Whatever is most convenient with you when you're programing.
 

BrianTokyo

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Nice app : ) Very fast with overwrite method, seems around as fast as mine :) (haven't compared). However, I noticed it's extremely slow when not overwriting, (in par with other trimmers other than mine). What block size are you using for loading/writing the files?
 

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