Dolphin's support of archive files?

[fawaz]

I've had this question in my mind for a while: Why doesn't Dolphin support archive formats? I assume the emulator doesn't constantly access the .iso file so it would be quite handy to be able to save some space on the hard drive if you can access the archive from within the emulator.

[mbc07]

Dolphin currently supports various compressed ISO formats like CISO, GCZ, RVZ and WIA. You'll probably want to use RVZ for the best balance between space savings and playability...

[JosJuice]

If you're referring to formats like .zip and .7z, it's because these formats are not seekable. This means that Dolphin would need to read the entire game into RAM before you can start playing it, which both takes time and wastes a lot of RAM.

But like mbc07 said, Dolphin supports other formats which are seekable and which let you save almost as much space (or actually even more space if you take into account RVZ's ability to compress the junk data of GC/Wii games). I would recommend converting your games to RVZ in Dolphin if you want to save space.

[fawaz]

Thank you @JosJuice and @mb07 for the answers. I've found the option for ISO's. Can you please guide me on how I can convert formats like WBFS to RVZ?

Also, please guide what settings in general would be suitable for compressing them?

[JosJuice]

(11-07-2020, 04:58 PM)fawaz Wrote: Can you please guide me on how I can convert formats like WBFS to RVZ?

Dolphin can't convert from WBFS, so you would need to first use some other program to convert from WBFS to ISO.

(11-07-2020, 04:58 PM)fawaz Wrote: Also, please guide what settings in general would be suitable for compressing them?

The defaults for RVZ are good. You can turn up the compression level if you're fine with compression taking longer, but avoid changing the block size and compression method settings, as they can cause lag when playing games if set to bad values.