Yet Another File Association Complaint Thread

[Joseph Collins]

I'm sure you're all getting tired of these by now. But come on. That should be a hint. Anyway, here's my story:

I'm going to say that first and foremost, I have nothing against SNES9X. It works for most people and it works for them well, but my experiences with it have been less than favorable. My emulator of choice is and always has been ZSNES. It may be a "dead emulator", but it works for what I want it for and has never failed to work for anything, aside from breaking movies on occasion. And that's what lead me to trying SNES9X again. I needed to record a longer movie and ZSNES can't handle that sort of thing... so I figured I'd give SNES9X a whirl, since that's what the TAS community uses.

So, I give it a whirl and everything works as expected. No problems whatsoever. The emulator is stable and everything controls well... better than expected, really! v1.53 seems to be a huge step above v1.52 for some reason. v1.52 seemed to stutter and break on my decently-powerful Windows XP machine, but 1.53 works in my much lower-end Windows 8 laptop pretty flawlessly! It's not as pretty as ZSNES (which also works flawlessly), but it's completely functional!

So days later, I decide to open a ZIP file. And that's when I found another reason to absolutely detest SNES9X for Windows. ... the program decided to associate almost random file extensions to itself automatically. Without my consent and without my knowledge. And I don’t mean the typical ROM extensions, like SFC or SMC files. No, it associated fairly common files such as ZIP and BIN to itself! And there is no way to keep it from doing this the first time you run it either, nor any subsequent time you run thing. And on top of all that, you can't disassociate the extensions through the program itself! You have to finagle a bloody external file to get SNES9X to "disassociate[/i] itself from files. But even then, it won't completely detach, oh no. From there, you have to fiddle with your file extensions directly and remove them.

I am quite upset about this. I strongly prefer to keep ROM files disassociated because I use a number of different emulators. If I’d wanted to associate SMC files to a specific program, I would have. Under no circumstances, however, do I want ZIP files associated with anything other than 7-zip. It doesn't matter that almost all my ROMs are actually in ZIP files. The fact of the matter is, this program associates ZIP files, as well as a crapload of other seemingly random extensions to itself without anyone's consent or usually knowledge and this seems to be completely and totally unavoidable.

I am not a happy camper, SNES9X team. This is some Apple-esque nonsense right here. I sincerely hope that you strongly reconsider this whole forced extension business in future versions.

Also, please don't tell me that "the test versions no longer do this" or that they "have registry files to unlink things". The damage is done and my opinion of your emulator has been altered because of it. If I'd know this was going to happen, I probably would have stuck with the grossly-outdated ReRecord branch TASvideos had going for a while. I don't need all the "latest and greatest compatibility and bugfixes" for my movie-making. I just need something that will record long movies consistently with no worry of ending up with a broken and useless input file. I just figured since v1.53 apparently has its own movie options, why not give it a try? Now I know why not.

I'm still going to use the emulator for movie-related things since I can't rely on ZSNES, but I don't believe I'll be recommending the official releases to anyone because of this.

Thank you for your time. Best of luck in your future.

[adventure_of_link]

you do realize your ROMs would still open fine in older/newer versions of Snes9X and even in ZSNES despite the program associating itself, right? Same goes for zip files, you can still open them in 7z no problem.

Having said that, I'll be moving this to the Tech Support forum.

[Joseph Collins]

That wasn't my point in the slightest. My point was simply that the program shouldn't automatically associate anything without the user's input. As I said before, if I'd wanted ROM files associated with specific emulators, I would associate them myself.

The only reason I mention that I'll still be using v1.53 of SNES9X is because the damage -- which is to say that a very minor thing that only bothers obsessive-compulsive people such as myself -- has already been done and there's no logical reason for me to use v1.52 or v1.52-RR if v1.53 has the exact same functionality.

[odditude]

My point was simply that the program shouldn't automatically associate anything without the user's input.

QFT. this behavior's got to go.

[8-bitBishop]

I am thoroughly annoyed as well! I downloaded this emulator, and thought is was great, until I found out it was associating itself with my ROMS! I can't disassociate it even after deleting it. Even when I delete my ROMS, and redownload them, they are still associated. I am extremely pissed off, because the work I do requires that I rename the extensions. I have no idea how to remove the associations from my ROM's, and cannot continue my work tonight because of this.

I joined this forum to voice this complaint. YES, I know about the damn valid extention, but it's too late now. Damnit Im so flippin' frustrated right now. Thanks a lot for hijacking my damn files!