Hacking Is it possible to use compressed roms in a flash card?

[GoldenSun3DS]

Like .Rar, .7z, or .Zip?
The reason I ask is because I only have a 2GB MicroSD Card and space will become an issue. Especially when 500MB roms like Pokemon B2 could easily become 250MB if compressed.
My card is the R4i Gold 3DS Revolution from nds-card.com btw, incase it matters.

 

[bobmcjr]

http://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-put-nds-games-on-your-flashcart.291098/

If the rom you downloaded is in a .rar or .zip format, extract it

You can trim your roms using tokyo trim or something like that. Not sure if B2 needs a patch that might interfere with trimming though.

 

[GoldenSun3DS]

How efficient is TokyoTrim? Also, would it be possible to later reverse the trim (without the original file)?

 

[Sicklyboy]

Very efficient but it depends on the ROM, it removes all unnecessary padding/garbage data.

You shouldn't need a patch if your cart isn't garbage.

You can untrim it but there's generally no reason to. Emulators on the PC and other consoles handle trimmed ROMs just fine.

 

[Rydian]

Trimming can remove up to ~49% of the size of a ROM. But it can also remove less than 1%. Totally depends on the game.

 

[GoldenSun3DS]

Trimming can remove up to ~49% of the size of a ROM. But it can also remove less than 1%. Totally depends on the game.

Wow, that sounds about as good as RAR compression.

 

[Cyan]

ROMs doesn't compress well in zip/rar anyway, you will have better file size by removing unused trailing bytes (trimming all the 0 after the actual game's data size).
if you used zip/rar on your flashcard, you would need to extract it every time before launching the game as the DS doesn't have a background processor to do it while playing, and you would end twice the size of the game on your SD card.

 

[N!ck]

Flashcarts aren't capable of running compressed games. You can trim the ROM files though.

 

[Coto]

it's possible to remove 00's but not the other way around, you'd need to write somewhere where those 00's belong..

 

[Sicklyboy]

it's possible to remove 00's but not the other way around, you'd need to write somewhere where those 00's belong..

Can't be bothered to test it, but see this - http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/utilities/download-nds-explorerex-110-f27143.html

It does support untrimming.

Not sure why anyone would want to anyway, though.

 

[GoldenSun3DS]

Anyone know if Lameboy can run GBC games from in zip folders?
I have my GB/GBC romset with each individual roms in their own zip folders...