Suggestion! - Achive compatibility!

[Arantor]

counter question - why does it make such a great difference to you if your game comes in one or in ~three files? (I see your point with games that come in 1,000 files, but that's the minority of games)

Doesn't to me. The key point here is less about number of files but about space usage. All I was originally pointing out is that ScummVM comes with a tool which arguably promotes making the game smaller and thus in line with the whole archiving thing.

in your initial post you talk about devices with little space - most current devices come with some kind of solid state media slot with gigabytes of storage - and no, compression won't reduce the amount of RAM needed (the real bottleneck) to play the games

Agreed, even though it wasn't my original point (since the last post was my first on the subject), as even a typical device will come with many multiple MBs of space, enough for all of the classic LA games to run in nicely, even without compression. It's just more convenient to have them all in a single file, especially if say you only have enough space for 2 games on your storage unit to be able to mix 'n' match easily if they're in a single file.

Actually, having compression will actually increase the RAM usage since it's got to be decompressed somewhere...

oh, and why not stop there - there have been 2 posts about how to load ISO files into ScummVM within the past 24 hours - would save us much hassle if ScummVM supported that, too (yeah, I'm sure there are legit users out there who save their CDs as ISO files on their HD, and for the pirates it doesn't make much difference if they download and play, or download, burn, copy and play (or mount))

I'm not advocating ISO support, I was just trying to understand all of the elements of this (and please note that I am not an advocate of piracy). I noticed both posts about ISOs and yes this is not a solution for ScummVM to go down. Zip support is one thing that could be included but I appreciate why not, and in reality there isn't much point for the reasons cited above.

There are very few reasons why you'd make an ISO out of a game you own, for your own legal use, usually where you have many games and it's more convenient to have the game as an ISO as opposed to having the CD. For example, a game which you use in DosBox which plays CD audio tracks in gameplay might be desirable to have on your computer as an ISO.

For ScummVM we have already established that an ISO is not necessary, and given the additional space you'd need for the ISO formatting, it's not even that practical (well, maybe it is if you have a big harddrive and a game with many small files)

There are circumstances it's appropriate to support archives, and times where it isn't, and here it isn't since you don't get any real benefit except saving a little hard drive space. I was more curious to see why if archive support is frowned upon, that tools to do just that are provided and supported.

Even multi-GB games aren't that hard to download any more, with bandwidth and the willingness to leave it on overnight to download.

[PsYcO]

mix 'n' match easily if they're in a single file.

use folders then...

really though the compression rate of archives is so minimal its not even worth mentioning.

[Arantor]

use folders then...

really though the compression rate of archives is so minimal its not even worth mentioning.

I do use folders, and besides that's how ScummVM is geared up anyway. I'm just thinking where maybe on a small storage device where every byte might count. (I haven't got one myself, I'm just trying to think of all the possibilities)

And I did actually try compressing the games down into ZIP out of curiosity to see the kinds of compression I could get... notwithstanding that compressing MONSTER.SOU to MONSTER.SOG already saves over 50% of the space, I was finding an overall trend of ZIP files being 50%-60% of the original size.

Of course there are smarter and better compressors out there (RAR is supposed to be good) so it may be even better than that, which does tend to suggest why archive support is more frowned upon than I thought (since it is clearly more encouraging to use than not)

[sev]

I'm just thinking where maybe on a small storage device where every byte might count. (I haven't got one myself, I'm just trying to think of all the possibilities)

Those do not exist anymore. Flash storage is cheaper than a dirt today.

As of older machines, such as handhelds, more problematic there are CPU time and especially memory. That is, they can not run bigger games with files count of hundreds megabytes anyway, and adding data compression for remaining smaller games will make things only worse. I.e. to uncompress you have to use CPU and memory which you are short of.

From the other hand, it is NOT possible to add ZIP or whatever compression to bigger games technically. Consider FT. It has that nice 150MB ft.la1. If you will want to read 2 bytes at the end of archive, you will have to uncompress previous 100's of million bytes. It will take considerable time even on modern big desktops. So what's the point?

Moreover. In those bigger games major amounts of space is taken by audio, which we offer option to compress.

If you really really want to have less files on your HD, let me suggest one scheme. Take your beloved CD/DVD burning program. Shuffle all your games files to new project. Switch to producing ISO file instead of burning to a real media. Then take Virtual CloneDrive (it's free), mount your ISO and point ScummVM to it. Voila! You will have just one big, say 8GB file on your hard drive with your whole collection.


Eugene

[JamesWoodcock]

You also have to consider support from publishers and indeed developers of the original games. There may be many more problems gaining source code if they consider (rightly or wrongly) compression support in the way of *.iso and *.zip could result in higher piracy of their product.

Sound compression and video compression is available for most games and that is always the biggest taker of space.

I understand why this issue appears time and time again, but there are ways to reduce the size of a game dramatically thanks to the ScummVM tools.

[Oncer]

From what I see the developers are too scared to add this feature.
What we need is an "inofficial" extension to ScummVM which gives ZIP support.
ZIP files are probably the best choice as they allow for streaming data directly from the archive. Or use a comparable format, maybe a self-developed GZIP archive format with individual file compression -- would have the same features.

Anyway, using archive file is extremely handy for mobile devices. They often use Flash devices with FAT16/FAT32 where it really depends on the file count, not only the size.

[sev]

ZIP files are probably the best choice as they allow for streaming data directly from the archive

Perhaps you skipped that part of my message which talks about technical issues. Please, reread.

Anyway, using archive file is extremely handy for mobile devices. They often use Flash devices with FAT16/FAT32 where it really depends on the file count, not only the size.

ScummVM runs on most modern mobile devices which allow homebrew. I am not aware of the issues you are talking about with any game ScummVM runs. And even on FAT16 this is only root directory which has restriction on number of entries. Nested directories do not have such problems. So this argument is hypothetical.


Eugene

[exofreeze]

Seriously people... learn to write a bloody batch file.

unzips game -> launches game via command line -> rezips when done to store progress.

Problem solved.

Real friggin difficult isn't it? So quit harassing the devs and ignoring the faq when you can easily implement it yourself.

I honestly think people make up problems just to suggest an answer which serves ulterior motives.

I have written over 2,000+ batch files to launch all my games via scummvm, dosbox, and various other old emulators.

I spent over a year cataloging all my old disk games, making backup images of them, and figuring out ways to load them into dos emulators via batch files.

I have archives of preconfigured ini/cfg/dat/whatever files that copy into my directory once the game is decompressed to avoid having to run setups.

My point is - NOT ONCE did I ever assume it was the responsibility of the various emulators and their developers to do this for me.