March 2025 Update

[emmercm]

Inspired by an update announcement I saw from RomM, I figured I'd give one, too!

---

I hope you're well, truly. In the v3.0.0 release announcement, I mentioned I was going to take some time away from Igir, as it had been taking up a significant amount of personal time, and I did just that. That means that a lot of issues and discussions went without response for months. I can't promise I'll always be timely with responses, but most issues should have a response or a clear path forward now.

I continue to be delighted with the response Igir has had. GitHub stars have increased nearly 40% since v3.0.0, and downloads have increased nearly 70%. That's awesome! Igir doesn't record or report any other usage data, so I'm always very interested to hear how you use it in the show and tell megathread.

v3.1.0

v3.1.0 released this week with support for GCZ, RVZ, and WIA via dolphin-tool. This addition had been in the works since September 2024, and it took a lot of trial & error to get the compilation right.

The other worthwhile callout is that you no longer need to manually install SDL2 for chdman to work on macOS. Unfortunately, it's still required on Linux. If anyone can figure out how to statically compile chdman I'd love your help as the MAME developers were quite abrasive when I asked.

Next

The open bug reports and feature requests that are ready to be worked on fall into two categories:

• Removing some hidden & unexpected behavior/restrictions with DATs
  • Allow running fixdat without --input #1348
  • Option "--dir-dat-name" truncates the internal name of some DATs #1412
• ROM filtering & preferences
  • --prefer-region not yielding correct results #1341
  • Enhancement Chip roms are still imported even with the --only-retail flag. #1342
  • Consider arcade hacks & bootlegs as non-retail #1349
  • (Website Documentation) Language filter DAT and ROM file behavior #1373
  • No way to exclude non-game categories #1389
  • Error with language filter #1390
  • '--prefer-revision newer' not working #1392

I want to tackle the filtering & preference issues next (after all, Igir was named after 1G1R!), but the list is long, and it will take some time.

Wishlist

I've never been in love with how Igir is packaged into executables. nexe never worked right for me, and caxa works by extracting every bundled file before running (which is in the thousands of files for Igir, plus caxa is no longer maintained). Using Bun compilation seems like it might be a winner, but it's going to require import attributes to bundle package.json, and I don't know how it will behave with the included chdman, maxcso, and dolphin-tool.

If someone here has some Bun expertise, I'd love help exploring it as an option!

[emmercm]

It turns out it didn't take some time. v3.2.0 was released with these changes on March 15th, and v3.3.0 has already come out since then.

[just-Bri]

No actual comment about the update, just wanted to say I appreciate you including the volta pin in the package.json lol

[emmercm]

You're welcome! You can thank @dcramer for getting me off of nvm and onto Volta 🙂.

And thank you so much for your sponsorship of the project! It was very generous!