In the interest of saving disk space

[antedr]

Hello, I'm not sure if this has already been brought up before or not but..

In interest of saving disk space, I made a simple *.cmd file for windows.

It looks something like this:

7z e game.7z
epsxe -loadbin game.img -nogui
del game.img


My psx roms are compressed initially. When I execute the *.cmd, 7zip.exe extracts the game image I choose to play and then epsxe loads it. When I exit from epsxe, the extracted image is deleted automatically.

You can easily save gigs and gigs of space depending on how many game images you have stored on your hard disk.

The largest drawback of course is the time it takes for the file to be extracted before you can play. This can be mitigated by using a lesser degree of compression (e.g. setting 7zip to compress in *.zip on fastest setting).

Anyway, just a thought.

[emurex]

what the point, you can compress it but then you will have to uncompress it and mind you it goes to your os temp directory on c: drive.

some users will have no qualm playing it in image mode, plus they can burn on cdr and play it via direct mount the image via psx emulators.

[antedr]

You can specify where the file will be upon decompression. In that little sample above, the *.cmd file assumes that all the files are in the same directory, including the *.cmd file itself. In that case, the file that is extracted stays in the same folder. Of course, you can edit paths for all the files involved depending upon where they are in a particular setup.

If you have 50 or so PS game images (or even 15 or 20, w/e) on a hard drive, this method can free a tremendous amount of space. The only time a game will be decompressed and taking up full space (including the additional space taken by the archive file itself) is during the time you are playing it. The rest of the games, however, will not. And since you will most likely be playing one game at a time, it works. You could also leave the games you most frequently play decompressed in order to lessen loading times before play.

This may be handy for those without CD burners or external hard drives or those with laptops that are lacking a CD-Rom drive, w/e. It can be made to work seamlessly with emulation frontends as well.

[ninja]

This is a very nice tip. Thanks. ;)