Why does every f'ing thread become another fanboy flame war about NSP vs XCI?
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They are file formats.
Here guys, let's start some other equally stupid fan wars.
JPG vs PNG? (zomg lossless)
DOC vs DOCX??? (old school is best amiright dont need new features)
ISO vs BIN? (lolwut?)
XML vs JSON (hint: both for nerds)
Maybe then we can fight over the pronunciation of GIF. I know I'd rather do that than actually play my games on whatever f'ing format is most convenient for my personal situation.
/sarcasm
As for BBB, the more I look into it the more convinced I am that they're full of sh*t. I'd have to get an actual copy of their release and look inside it, but I strongly suspect that the additional files they include are redundant information. The jpegs 100% are. See my previous posts if you want to know what I'm talking about.
The best way to know would be to have documentation or source code for the NSP install function. I believe I saw somewhere that the switch OS has a system call for installing gaming files and it supports NSP - if so I can only assume that existing installers are calling that function, right? Any files not directly read or copied by that function are not needed, imo. I've looked in the SD folder at the installed games, and their the only files are the NCA files. I don't know which files are copied into system memory, and I don't know what other information is pulled from the NSP files and added to the operating system (for example, the title icon, developer, and other metadata are surely read and stored in the OS when the game is registered).
As a reminder for you guys - NSPs are nothing but an archive, like a tarball. It takes an arbitrary set of files and glues them together, then slaps a header at the top that describes the names of the files, how big they are and where they start in the file so you can unpack the files. That's literally all it is. You can make an NSP out of your vacation photos. There isn't even any encryption or compression. It is actually a renamed PFS0 file-type, which is a type of file system / file archive that, along with ROMFS, is used by NCAs to pack the game files up. A game can "mount" the file so the files can be read just like loading up a directory in your file manager. So yeah, I'm not sure that NSP is even a strictly defined thing, unless Nintendo has some documentation about what the file type is "supposed" to have. I'd LOVE to see that, actually.
edit: Let me make it clear that I'm not accusing BBB of being wrong, exactly, and I don't want to throw shade even though I used the unfortunate phrase "full of sh*t". I'm no switch expert - either they know something I don't, in which case I'm happy to be enlightened, or they don't know squat and are posing. Without knowing what that "something" is I'm just left guessing, as is everyone else. The vagueness of what an NSP is allows anyone to claim "this" is what an NSP really is, but nothing short of nintendo documentation (or an NSP handed straight to you on a usb stick from a nintendo dev) can confirm or deny it. Even reading source code or tracing what the switch does when the NSP is installed wouldn't be enough, because there might be data in an NSP that isn't being used *now*, but might be important later when they add code to access it in future firmware.