Rar Loader for RPCS3 (proof of concept)

[Nixx]

 

For my personal need, i want to have one file = one game, and i don't want to use iso, so i store each game in rar and i was wondering if i can manage a way to launch a game in rpcs3 using a rar file as argument.

So i make something that work, but with so much con... I mean it's good enough for me, but i wonder if that's something that's good enough to be rlz for the general public.

But still, i think at least the idea was interesting and worth sharing

How does it work ?

You pass the rar file as an argument, the program use Linux subsystem (wsl) to mount the file using rar2fs, and launch rpcs3.exe using the wsl network path of the mounted file.
So, basically, when i execute : .\RpcsLauncher.exe --no-gui "G:\ps3\ok\BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend [BLUS30869].rar"

In my wsl Ubuntu, it does : 
mkdir ~/rpcs/1F3401C3553A8BDB0524D5D5DAB1D3F5 (md5 of the archive name)
sudo rar2fs  "/mnt/g/ps3/ok/BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend [BLUS30869].rar" ~/rpcs/1F3401C3553A8BDB0524D5D5DAB1D3F5 -o allow_other

And in windows : rpcs3.exe --no-gui "\\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu\home\username\rpcs\1F3401C3553A8BDB0524D5D5DAB1D3F5\BlazBlue - Continuum Shift Extend (USA) (En,Ja,Zh,Ko)\PS3_GAME\USRDIR\EBOOT.BIN"

Now the cons :

- Only works with physical drives (i guess that could be work around mounting network drive within wsl)
- Only works with plain text rar (storage mode) because full media seek support (aka. indexing) is only available for non-compressed plaintext archives (Possible solution, instead of rar archive, use squasfs files using zstd to compress, but i don't really care about compression, i just want one file per game)
- You need to be able to setup wsl, compile rar2fs, add it to sudoers.

If really someone other than me is interested, i will give my dirty source code and futhers instructions.