What do you think happened with data compression?

[Reploid]

I remember PSP days. Those silly unwanted by anyone, but sony, Memory Stick Duo cards were kinda expensive in my country, while PSP games themselves were kinda big, comparable to regular games of the era. Put there were many great tools to both trim ISOs and compress them. Like you can remove padding, FW update, unwanted tongues and FMVs from a game and make it significantly smaller, and at the top of that convert ISO to CSO to make it even more portable. Some titles were several times smaller after this, like Gripshift, that was only several dozens MBs, instead of several hundreds. I enjoy optimizing games that way.

NDS had rom trimming, but in only remove padding. To compression, to handy tool to remove unnecessary data or anything. Not a big issue, considering how small games were compared to vita, and no silly unwanted memory card formats were required.

But 3DS could use something like that, but it never came to be. Games on PSP technical level, so I bet there is space to save inside those .3DSs and .CIAs.

But Vita would benefit the most, with it's silly hilariously expensive useless sony vita memory cards to use with huge games. It's kinda thing of the best now, with all those hot SD adapters, but still most games have good compression ratio and it would be really cool to use them like this right on Vita itself.

Why to you think no one tried to implement said features on modern handhelds? Switch won't have this feature too? It really could use it, since Switch's games can be really big, compared to it's predecessors.

 

[FAST6191]

There were DS ROM rips (ripping being the term for removing extraneous fmvs, audio, levels..., which does indeed get confusing when people talking about ripping a disc), indeed that is probably how I got started in DS ROM hacking (here is me in 2005 with such a thread https://ezflash.sosuke.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=457 and I believe the first general ROM patcher included a note on how to get Castlevania down to the 256MBit flash carts many still had from the GBA days). Such things became largely unnecessary and thus not done all that much when SDHC prices kept falling for the size you got and DS games failed to keep pace.
A few scene groups also introduced extra compression to the binaries in a bid to gain a bit more space, though these were widely criticised.

Wholesale compression of DS games was infeasible owing to the way flash carts worked there (on the GBA with later things copying to RAM or NOR you could afford to do it, the optical media based PSP was always going to have latency to handle).

I did like the PSP umdgen program's ability to relink directly in the program. No tools I am aware of did it for the DS so anything you see like that probably had some hacker do manually.

I have not followed the 3ds much to see what went as far as this -- nothing stopping you from removing and relinking things from the ROMFS. If it did not then it might have been because size was not such an issue as cards were cheap and still relatively ahead of the curve. Failing that the 3ds scene was not particularly coherent (see all the drama and trauma with custom firmwares) and it lacked the games to really kick off a robust ROM hacking scene like the GBA or DS did when they were still current.

Switch I could see it returning for if sizes are going to pose a problem (and they already seem to be).

 

[gamesquest1]

I think its just the cost/time ratio tipped in the other direction, that said trimming 3DS roms was a thing when .3ds format was used, but once things moved over to using .cia files the padding was already removed

if the PSvita SD adapters never came out I could see rips becoming more prevalent, but again the price dropped with the release of SD2Vita so the demand was quashed.

the very fact that the last generation of systems abused the official distribution methods also played a big role, if you can grab the full game directly from Sony/Nintendo at full speed why would anyone want to so find some dodgy file sharing site with dead links etc for the sake of saving 200mb

that said on systems where game sizes are big and storage options are limited eventually some games will end up being ripped, back before hard drives could be used for storing wiiu games I found myself compressing the video files for hyrule warriors and stripping out the language files for watchdogs, I think mostly it boils down to end users becoming a bit more self reliant (or maybe just games using more common formats), if I want to save space I can do it myself, I don't need someone else to resize/recompress mp4 files or delete obvious files such as "French_localisation.dat", I can just try it myself, if it works I'm happy if not I don't really care too much I just decide if its easier to stick to using the disk

 

[SANIC]

Probably because everyone now wants the full experience and not a butchered game

 

[gamesquest1]

Probably because everyone now wants the full experience and not a butchered game

not really, often rips were just removing extra languages etc, it wasn't very common to see games "butchered" sure sometimes load times were increased, but other times the ripping process led to faster loadtimes, so there wasn't a definitive good/bad option,

I think its just price/effort, nobody can be bothered now as size isn't really a prohibitive factor anymore for most people (this covers storage sizes and download times etc)

I'm sure if you adjust the sizes to be comparative to the old experience people would be just as happy to get a butchered version if it mean not spending a week downloading each game and needing a £30 memory card for each title, humans haven't suddenly become more refined we are just the same as always, except we are just spoiled now and don't have the same issues to deal with as people used to

 

[BORTZ]

I think that the 3DS roms are fine simply because flash memory is relatively cheap. I understand that is not a perfect solution, but it works.

Vita, sure. Sony and their proprietary shiz can stuff it. I know its just a way to make them money but it really really sucks.