Nintendo DS Vault: Switch from Zip to 7zip [Propos

Posted by Omega3komma3 on .
So this post is a Proposal to switch the NDS files we download from Vimm.net. Motivation: I store all my Games on an SSD and they are kinda expensive or at least a lot more expensive than HDDs. So whenever I can I compress my ROMs to save valuable Hard-drive space. The emulator I use for playing NDS games is MelonDS and it supports a variety of File Formats (.nds; .tar.gz; .tar.bz2; .zip; .7z;…) so just keeping the ROMs in a compressed file format is absolutely viable. Why switch?: 7z is better at compressing than zip. Very simple but to demonstrate I took 56 NDS games with a total Filesize of 6,63GB and compressed them individually to the file formats listed above and these are the results: .nds 100% (obviously) .tar.gz 57,01% .tar.bz2 55,53% .zip 56,25% .7z 46,15% So .zip is good but .7z is better by a lot. And not just that, on my Laptop the .zip compression took way longer than any of the other formats, at least double the amount of time. Conclusion / Pros and Cons: Pros: - Better Compression -> Less storage Taken up on the Servers - Smaller file Sizes -> less bandwidth usage Cons: - Files will have to be Recompressed If you can think of other Pros and Cons I’d like to know.