GS Editor - Poll #2: Unpacking

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Yeah, another opinion poll already!

Here I go thinking of a new concept idea for the editor... Basically, what if I literally unpacked the ROM? I mean to take all of the code and tables that one would resize, and make them into individual .asm, .txt, .dat, etc... files....? That way, I wouldn't have to manually update my pointers, and can just equip all the files together when "Compiled." There's a possibility that it might be a trade-off, but...


Unpacking: This one may require plenty of seconds to "Decompile" and "Compile" when loading and saving the ROM? ; This may also take up more space on the hard drive.
Direct ROM management: May require me to update table references in my editor bank file.... etc. Not that I see that as much of a problem? 

I have not thought a whole lot about this.

Discuss.

[Wolf]

Unpacking the editor would take up more space as you mentioned.  Couldn't you make a copy of it, unpack the copy on a usb drive, and update it there?  The latest updated version could be moved to your computer and stored on the usb, just make sure the editor replica functions after being moved to and from an external storage space.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Unpacking the editor

No, it's unpacking the ROM, you wolfienstein.. Haha... But yeah, thank you for letting me know I wasn't clear on that. (And I have updated my post a tiny bit.) You would have known it was the ROM if you had read the question I left unedited:

Should I go 'unpacking' the ROM, or just manage the data within the ROM? (Like currently)

The point of unpacking the ROM was to have another way of dealing with reference pointers in the ROM's code and possibly in data tables, etc.

Since not everyone has USB thumb drives, etc... I don't see those as a reliable approach. Since ROM is mostly cheap these days, it's not like most people would run out of room on their hard drive.

The idea is to unpack when you first open the ROM, and for the remainder of the time, you are just using the unpacked files.

[Misery]

I just have a feeling it might cause some complications, but I'm not sure what. Sounds kind of "risky", but that may be because I haven't thought a lot about it either. Sorry if that sounds overly pessimistic. Would be great if you can make it work without any issues, but it seems like one of those cases where a problem can remain unnoticed for a long time, only to surface much later. The extra space requirement is a non-issue though, I don't think there's a computer today that would notice the difference (technically they all could, but that's beside the point).

Since ROM is mostly cheap these days, it's not like most people would run out of room on their hard drive.

ROM? The memory on your hard drive isn't read-only, geez that would be terrible.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

I'm thinking both ways could end up being risky to some extent. Golden Sun is only 8MB, and GS2 is 16 MB... Both with lots of free space.

If we were to look at how much space common data formats take up, it might help a little bit.

For example:
08320000+ is the Master File Table in GS1

08300000+ Sprites stuff in GS2
08680000+ is the Master File Table in GS2

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When it comes to errors in ROM code and navigating to other sections... I start thinking maybe it's worth having individual files for ROM code at the very least... For example, maybe you have an error in your code, and you don't feel like fixing it yet... I'll probably want to copy all the data to somewhere on the hard drive either way, in case anyone experiences unexpected BSOD's not caused from the editor, I guess. - Since I've been using W8, I think I've had maybe 1 unexpected BSOD. I forgot what it looked like, though. (Other problems I've had that weren't related were some errors that kept me from upgrading to W8.1)