Hacking Zip support?

[Tavis]

Do any carts offer support?

 

[bullet007]

Nope, as it would either take the game a long time to load (cart "unzips" the rom and stores it in a temp folder), or it would be very laggy ("unzip" on the fly)

 

[Tavis]

I dunno.. 5-10 second additional load time for 2-3x more games? That's something the consumer should be able to decide.

 

[lagman]

hmmm 5-10 seconds for small games, I wouldn't be surprised if a big game -Ouendan,Resident Evil,etc- take more than a minute to be unzipped on the DS.
And...you'll need extra space for the temporary file and then for the unzipped file.

Just trim your roms

 

[Destructobot]

Even a minute is optimistic. Some slot 2 carts (the G6 for example) allow you to compress GBA games, which is possible because they have to be loaded into RAM before they can be run, and that adds up to 2 minutes or more to the time it takes the game to start. The DS CPU is about 4 times as fast as the GBA CPU, but DS games are more than 4 times as big as GBA games on average.

In addition, no flashcart has enough RAM to hold even a medium size DS game (and slot 1 carts don't have any RAM at all), so it would have to be written to a reserved area in flash memory, which would make things even slower. This could easily add another minute to the loading time. You're looking at over 3 minutes to load a game.


It would not be possible to run a zipped DS game without decompressing it first unless the flashcart had dedicated hardware for that purpose, which would increase the cost significantly. The DS does not have any extra memory to run decompression code in addition to running the game.

 

[Tavis]

Even a minute is optimistic. Some slot 2 carts (the G6 for example) allow you to compress GBA games, which is possible because they have to be loaded into RAM before they can be run, and that adds up to 2 minutes or more to the time it takes the game to start. The DS CPU is about 4 times as fast as the GBA CPU, but DS games are more than 4 times as big as GBA games on average.

In addition, no flashcart has enough RAM to hold even a medium size DS game (and slot 1 carts don't have any RAM at all), so it would have to be written to a reserved area in flash memory, which would make things even slower. This could easily add another minute to the loading time. You're looking at over 3 minutes to load a game.


It would not be possible to run a zipped DS game without decompressing it first unless the flashcart had dedicated hardware for that purpose, which would increase the cost significantly. The DS does not have any extra memory to run decompression code in addition to running the game.

Okie dokie. That makes sense