Any plans for native zip support

[Squall Leonhart]

No, this is just for storing ISOs as they're so darn big. NTFS compression doesn't seem all that great for them, and I'm wary about turning them all into linuz compressed files.

ntfs compression is about as affective as minimal lzma compression.

[Livy]

PlayStation 2 isos are kinda hard to compress. Using 7-zip 9.20, with the highest compression and 256 MB dictionary size, games reduce their sizes around 20% to 50%. Few titles can be compress to 50%, most remain 80% after compressed. And you waste your time extract it. Now imagine a zip compression. I suppose the file remains 90%.

I used to compress the images to save some space for my poor 295 GiB HDD. But I soon found that it was not effective.

[refraction]

the problem is the fact we have to access sectors randomly and to do so with a solid archive is difficult. Linuziso achieves it by mapping a table of the bzipped blocks so it can access bits quickly, i don't know how possible this would be with RAR or 7zip, but even if it was possible you'd have to re7zip/rerar from inside the plugin to generate the table.

the bzip compression with linuz iso should be adequate for ps2 iso's however, rar and 7zip is overkill considering most content is compressed in packages anyway, it's only dummy files which are really compressable.

[vgrageaholic]

With NTFS compression, Windows doesn't have to decompress the whole file somewhere when PCSX2 opens it does it?

[refraction]

No, windows compresses chunks of the file and references it in its file table.

[avih]

With NTFS compression, Windows doesn't have to decompress the whole file somewhere when PCSX2 opens it does it?

No, it uses internally a system similar to the LinuzIso compression: It allows relatively quick random reads (relative to solidly compressed files). Which is why we recommend to do a fileststem/NTFS compression if your system supports it.

BTW, such system - which allows random access to a compressed file - harms the compression (as in: the resulting file is bigger than otherwise), which is why comparison to 7z compressed files is not valid in our case.

[naoan]

By the way now that we're on this topic, can't the lookup table of linuzapp be integrated to the compressed image to avoid user error who may accidentally delete it?

[refraction]

if someone accidently deletes it, they can extract the bzip file manually and then re-bzip it.

[naoan]

Um, how do I do that again?

[refraction]

actually you cant, thought you could, but me and avih tried it and it doesn't like it