Hacking Compressed Roms

[gotenksnath]

I was wondering if anyone knew a way that roms can be run in compressed format. such as through a loader that can uncompress them before load or anything else

. thanx in advance if anyone knows.

 

[andw]

Pretty sure it can't, I would think it would need a bit more RAM and/or processing power to decompress them.

 

[Sinkhead]

Pretty sure it can't, I would think it would need a bit more RAM and/or processing power to decompress them.

To decompress ROMs in a reasonable amount of time the DS would need more powerful hardware. Some flashcart manufacturers have looked into compression but decided too few people would use it because of the long wait time needed for a decent compression rate.

 

[FAST6191]

DSCompress (I think I was the one to upload it to the downloads section) can do zip and gz formats.
The whole wait thing mentioned coupled with the relatively poor compression (when you compress a rom most of the space is just that which you would save trimming save a couple of roms which the devs left stuff like unicode where ASCII would be fine).
As GBA roms tend to be written elsewhere on a cart these days they are a good candidate for compression (as I recall Chuckstudios' 3 in1 app has it built in).