Hacking Compressed ROMs

[chuckstudios]

This conversation is so pointless. But hey, I have nothing better to do, so:

A flash cart with GBA support may be able to run compressed roms as long as they're under 32mb (meaning they fit in the cart it's RAM). And even then, as mentioned before, you do indeed still need to use a simpler compression method than RAR. Let's say this saves you maybe optimistically 10 mb per 32 mb rom. Guessing from the loading of GBA roms, load times would be around a minute. Would anyone care for this?

I would, it was called the EZFlash 3 and I loved it.

 

[Lukeage]

well storage is always getting cheaper, most people these days wouldn't care much for compression features on a DS cart.

Basically summarising what other people have said, the space saving benefit does not outweigh the time disadvantage.

Agreed on the cost of storage. If you can't afford to go any buy a 2gig cart (which should hold more than enough games anyhow) then you probably don't have enough money to afford a DS and flashcart to being with. These things are so cheap these days.

As restore has mentioned, the cost of doing it on the fly is significant. To even be able to pull it off at speed would require a compression designed to handle random access within the rom. Unfortunately, this would reduce the amount of compression, due to the file needing to be broken up into smaller segments, which would need to be compressed independently of each other (they might be able to share a the same dictionary though...).