Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2020/07/05/...june-2020/

The May and June Dolphin Progress Report is live! Feel free to discuss this month's update below.

Wow, I'm quite impressed by the RVZ compression. The fact that it can stand toe to toe with scrubbed formats is really awesome! Though, I did miss the compression method, I assume Zstandard was used?

Great job writing up these changes by JMC and May. Always very interesting to read. Thank you guys!

I too am curious what the recommended settings are for RVZ. In particular, settings that balance good compression without sacrificing game performance?

(07-06-2020, 01:21 AM)iwubcode Wrote: [ -> ]I too am curious what the recommended settings are for RVZ. In particular, settings that balance good compression without sacrificing game performance?

The defaults are good for that. You can also turn up the compression level without any impacts on game performance if you want to, but it will make the compression process slower.

Nice job with WIA and RVZ support, JosJuice! That's pretty exciting stuff right there.

Awesome stuff as always.
Regarding games files, I have some questions :

1. Is a .gcm file just a renamed .iso ?
2. Can I revert back to a 1:1 disk dump by converting back gcz to gcm ?
3. Is wbfs a lossless format ? Should I dump again all my Wii games ?
4. Which Wii homebrew can I use to create clean GC and Wii disks dumps ?

My goal is to have a nice and clean lossless GC/Wii library.

That 2016 header seems familiar. Could it be from Tales of Symphonia?

(07-06-2020, 02:17 AM)DrHouse64 Wrote: [ -> ]1. Is a .gcm file just a renamed .iso ?

Yes.

(07-06-2020, 02:17 AM)DrHouse64 Wrote: [ -> ]2. Can I revert back to a 1:1 disk dump by converting back gcz to gcm ?

It depends on how it was created. In older versions of Dolphin, GCZ would be scrubbed (which is lossy) for Wii games but not for GameCube games. In the latest versions of Dolphin, this is configurable.

(07-06-2020, 02:17 AM)DrHouse64 Wrote: [ -> ]3. Is wbfs a lossless format ? Should I dump again all my Wii games ?

It is as far from lossless as you can come when it comes to Wii file formats.

(07-06-2020, 02:17 AM)DrHouse64 Wrote: [ -> ]4. Which Wii homebrew can I use to create clean GC and Wii disks dumps ?

CleanRip.

Thanks a lot.
I checked out the Verify feature on my Wii games, seems like my dumps aren't correct.

RVZ is awesome! Great job! This is the format most people were waiting for if they knew or not!
Also good job mentioning loss-less compression and why it is so important for an older console.

I sometimes lurk on Github and I was wondering if maybe LZ4 https://github.com/lz4/lz4 would also be a good compression alogrithm to implement, since it can decompress so fast and maybe reduce stuttering even further.
Or is Zstandard good enough and LZ4 is not worth the hassle?

Another thing is, there are already recommended compression algorithms, but not a recommended format. Maybe put a "recommended" tag to RVZ? I guess most people only compress their game once to clear up diskspace and do not go back and forth between formats. Recommending RVZ then seems like the next best step, right?