I'm not sure if this posts belongs here, apologies if not.
I was wondering about the possibility of compressing generic roms with rvz. I realize that a lot of the work and savings maye come from GC/wii specific stuff. however even without that I think it would be beneficial to have for the software preservation and overall emulation community.
currently the "go to" so to speak for rom compression is .chd and as I'm sure many are aware of, while it offers great compression. it suffers from both encode and decode overhead due to limited support for compression algorithms the most common being lzma and zlib. this is an issue actually briefly talked about in the blog post covering the release of rvz. (Dolphin Progress Report: May and June 2020 ) and it doesn't seem like support for zstd or other low overhead compression algorithms will be coming to chd for quite some time.
this presents a potential benefit to software preservation and individuals with a fair amount of roms, low end hardware users such as SBCs can often get hit pretty hard by the decode penalty. but it also would be benefical to those storing large quantities of roms as it allows rapid compression which can be a large factory when dealing with hundreds of roms.
although people who may benefit from this using preservation is a small group, I believe it would still greatly benefit the first group of people if it would be possible to compress roms with rvz. even if no emulator supports it, assuming the rom is small enough, thanks to zstd compression it would be fairly trivial to temporarily uncompressed it, use it, then delete the uncompressed copy when done.
Thanks for your time.
I was wondering about the possibility of compressing generic roms with rvz. I realize that a lot of the work and savings maye come from GC/wii specific stuff. however even without that I think it would be beneficial to have for the software preservation and overall emulation community.
currently the "go to" so to speak for rom compression is .chd and as I'm sure many are aware of, while it offers great compression. it suffers from both encode and decode overhead due to limited support for compression algorithms the most common being lzma and zlib. this is an issue actually briefly talked about in the blog post covering the release of rvz. (Dolphin Progress Report: May and June 2020 ) and it doesn't seem like support for zstd or other low overhead compression algorithms will be coming to chd for quite some time.
this presents a potential benefit to software preservation and individuals with a fair amount of roms, low end hardware users such as SBCs can often get hit pretty hard by the decode penalty. but it also would be benefical to those storing large quantities of roms as it allows rapid compression which can be a large factory when dealing with hundreds of roms.
although people who may benefit from this using preservation is a small group, I believe it would still greatly benefit the first group of people if it would be possible to compress roms with rvz. even if no emulator supports it, assuming the rom is small enough, thanks to zstd compression it would be fairly trivial to temporarily uncompressed it, use it, then delete the uncompressed copy when done.
Thanks for your time.