no, unzipping a file to ram and unzipping to a temporary file on a device is definitively not the same thing, if only for the operation speed.
So would running the emulator off a USB flash drive versus a USB harddrive not be the same thing either, because of the average lower write speed of a flash drive?
the location in ram is not deleted and is not temporary in the way it is kept that way until you load another file, it's not copied from a temporary RAM placeholder to final RAM destination, it is directly uncompressed to final RAM destination.
The uncompressed copy exists within the system's memory (in both RAM and drive cases) because the compressed copy cannot be used as-is.
To clarify something I mentioned earlier,
files on FAT/NTFS drives aren't actually "deleted". Instead the filesystem removes the pointers to that file, effectively marking the space it occupied as "free". This is one of the things that allows programs such as
TestDisk to recover "deleted" files. As long as the files are not overwritten, they can be recovered (minus filesystem metadata, such as the filename). This is the same sort of operation used to "remove" things from RAM. When something in RAM isn't needed anymore, the space it occupied is marked as free and then overwritten as needed.
uncompressing a zip file and writing it back to a temporary file then reading from this file into RAM is ALWAYS going to be less efficient than directly uncompressing a zip file to RAM, period.
False. Loading an entire 10MB file into RAM for access uses more RAM then writing a 10MB file to disk and only loading the parts that are needed at the time. RAM is so tight with this setup that the devs have killed off ideas of using a GUI (at least last I paid attention to the talk of it), so any saving (that doesn't impact on emulation speed) helps.
Swapping ROM parts being read isn't something normally thought about as most ROM-based emulation systems work with files that are considered tiny to the host machine... for example the Pokemon Platinum (U) ROM is 128MB, and loading it into Desmume causes the entire ROM to be loaded into RAM because the emulator knows that any system that could run it could very well hold the entire ROM in RAM at once (in fact a single browser tab on an ad-laden website can easily eat up more RAM than that). This is feasible for the host system.
However when you load Kingdom Hearts 2 (3.8GB) into PCSX2, it certainly doesn't load the whole thing into RAM. It loads smaller portions from the drive as needed (the emulator uses ~155MB for me during the intro FMV), and in most cases the performance hit for doing this is negligible, since disc-based systems usually have much slower reads then internal/external storage anyways (this can be seen when loading PSP ISOs from a memory stick, load times are generally shortened compared to running a physical disc).
i agree with he last part though, it s a design choice and limitation and is not really that much annoying in the end
I agree the file should be removed when it's not needed anymore. I just felt the need to point out that the file needs to exist somewhere in order to be used, and on the Wii RAM isn't the vast usable space it is on a PC.