Now, I'm _really_ not an emulator expert, but as I recall both snes9x and zsnes will read rom dumps from zip files. So it seems to be possible to do this without too much cooperation.
If archivers started including useful metadata in addition to the rom dumps, I'm sure the emulators would start to use it as well.
The latter. I support this, but it does no good when no one uses the format. The most prominent databasing effort will not include any additional files. Not even metadata, they're missing the coprocessor firmware required to play games. I wrote about this a few years back here ( https://higan.byuu.org/firmware ), but fair warning it's a bit rantier than my recent articles ^^;
I've just taken a shotgun approach recently: supporting games split into multiple pieces inside folders, games inside ZIP archives, games in merged files to a single ROM, games with external firmware in a separate subfolder, games played by an internal database, games that have an external manifest to describe the PCBs, games played by heuristic detection, and games that fall back on less accurate high-level emulation instead of not booting at all.
If archivers started including useful metadata in addition to the rom dumps, I'm sure the emulators would start to use it as well.
Or maybe the archivers are the problem?
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