Multiple Rom Downloads

[punkydudester]

Have you ever considered making it possible for "unlimited Users" to download multiple roms at the same time like making a list to add roms to so that they download consecutively? That would be a great insentive for more people to become unlimited users rather than downloading 1 at a time.

[Kherr]

You mean like a download taxi?

[Guest]

Which would also allow all the unlimited users to be leeches... But I kind of like the idea

[punkydudester]

Glad to hear it. I don't mean to the point of causing problems for everyone else but maybe have a limit of 5 or 10 at once. I just thought it would be convenient & another good reason for becoming an Unlimited user.

[Hot Trout]

It is a very good idea. I will need to look into the coding of that in the SQL database. I will come back to this again.

[punkydudester]

To help I want to be more specific. What I think may work best is if you can add roms to a list & this list lets you download them in order as you added them like a wish list. This list would only allow 1 rom at a time to download & of course for unlimited users only. I think that would be a huge incentive. I know that the smaller system roms only take a few seconds so you could go through 30 NES games in like a minute with a list. This would especially help with bigger games like N64 & PS1 games. You could make your list of say 30, or whatever you dicide the max should be if you want one, then you don't have to keep checking your computer every 2 minutes to load another. Just sporting some ideas. I know in the end it's your call.

[Hot Trout]

It is an excellent idea and one which I think I will look at soon. Keep em coming.

[Quanzi]

Why not just pack up a zip file of all the roms in a section so you can grab them all with one click? It seems a lot simpler than coding the site to allow multiple downloads and you can probably even use a simple script to add any new roms to the archive automatically.

[Hot Trout]

This has already been done, look for a folder called Single Download Mega Rom Packs within each system section.

[Hot Trout]

IMPORTANT : I have an update to this story.

Without me knowing, for quite a few months there has been a PHP problem with downloads from the roms section that prevented everyone from downloading more than one rom at a time. This was almost unnoticable for small roms due to the speed they downloaded however when downloading PS1 or other large roms the user could not start another download or even browse the site until it had finished. This issue was raised again recently by spikejones who was a little more than pissed off (understandably). Thankfully he got me thinking and I started to test the roms section with different account types and discovered the issue was real.

After four days of working with the host and apache engineers we discovered it had to do with how PHP handles cached scripts. It does not normally allow a second script to be run while one is already running. This is normal. For large downloads however this was a problem due to the length of time it took to complete the download script.

After some re-coding the issue appears to be fixed and unlimited members can download up to 5 files at the same time now.

I want to say sorry to everyone for this bug, it was not caused by anything I did but had to do with a security update in Apache which was installed as a matter of routine. I especially want to say sorry to Spikejones for initially not listening to his complaint. It did get me thinking though and the result is a far faster roms download section with no hiccups. I want to add a big thank you as well