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.
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.