Hacking M3 rom storage

[misticknight]

is there anyway to play your games zipped on the M3, or at least compress the .nds file? i allready have 1 gig worth of roms, which is allrite cause when i do get an M3 i am going to get a 2 gig card so i'll still have another gig for music/movies, but still, if i can make the files smaller, or play them zipped to save space it'll better. also, before i do buy an M3 mini-SD, is there any news on that new smaller version, i heard about it like a month ago but havent heard anything since, is it still being made?

 

[misticknight]

someone answer plz, if theres away i'd really like to know.

 

[Darkforce]

No, you cannot zip nds files. As for the version that fits flush with the DS lite, you'll probably hear more about it towards the end of the month as supposedly that's then the Supercard Lite is released. I personally can't see the smaller M3 being released till the middle of next month myself.

 

[misticknight]

is there any way to compress the .nds file itself though? what i mean is, my brother has a program for GBA roms could "ReduceGBAROM" where it shrinks the size of the rom itself from say 6.mb to 4mb, anything like that on DS or no? and thanks for clearing it up on new M3 i hope your right and it will be released next month.

 

[KidIce]

is there any way to compress the .nds file itself though? what i mean is, my brother has a program for GBA roms could "ReduceGBAROM" where it shrinks the size of the rom itself from say 6.mb to 4mb, anything like that on DS or no? and thanks for clearing it up on new M3 i hope your right and it will be released next month.

That's not compression it's just removing excess space. "Official" GBA carts only come in certain sizes (ie 32 Mb, 64 Mb, 128Mb and 256 Mb). Since almost no game is going to be exactly those sizes there is always extra space on the cart, which is usually just padded w/ 1's or 0's. When you dump a cart you dump the whole 32, 64, etc megabits of the cart including the padding. What tools like the above do is strip off the padding.

As an example lets say you have a game that is actually 80 Mb (10 megabytes). The "real" cartridge would be a 128Mb (16 megabyte) cart. When you dumped the cart to a computer you would end up w/ a 16 MB file on your HD and your reducing tool would obviously strip off the 6 ME of padding.

You cannot have compressed images on a flash cart if they are to be ran in place. There is not a flash card I know of that does not run DS software right from where it's written. The reason some flash carts offer compression of GBA games is that they have some memory (128 Mb's) where the game is decompressed or copied to for execution. There isn't enough of this "extra" memory to do the same w/ most NDS games. So even if this feature was implimented on any of the current flash carts you still wouldn't be able to compress most NDS games, and siince it would only be the smallest games that you could compress it would sort of defeat the purpose I think.

 

[misticknight]

ohi get it, thanks for the reply tho, guess if i run out of space i'll just have to buy another card.