Unnecessarily long disk images?
 

I've noticed (what may be) a new trend in CD images, that once extracted from their archives they consume gigabytes of harddrive space. Is there some way to get them back down to the few megabytes that gutted disk images are supposed to be? Is there something that I haven't been informed about?

I'm struggling with space on my laptop here, and the entire point is that I 1) don't want to carry CDs/DVDs around with me just to play games, and 2) don't want to use up as much space as the installed data just to do so (every disc image I hold on here will be one more game I can't keep installed on my system. That would be stupid). I may as well just create images of my entire CDs/DVDs and store those.

They are called maxi-images. Some games require these as they look at the size of data on discs.

Right-click on the file and turn on Windows compression :D
(The size when looking at file properties will remain the same, but my computer will show the full amount of free space)

Cheers

-Leezer-

But using one of the megabyte-sized image files and checking the properties of the emulated drive while mounted reports the proper disk size. If the game data were checking for the size of the emulated file, wouldn't that mean it would know that the disk is being emulated?

Is there a drawback to using compression? For example, I defragment regularly.

Answer to question 1: They dont check for that, I dunno why, send them a letter of complaint if you feel like it :P

Answer to question 2: No drawbacks that I am aware of, but since this is Microsoft we are talking about, always be prepared for the unexpected because their stupidity is incredible and beyond.

I suppose it doesn't matter: I tried applying disk compression to one of these maxi images (I run Windows XP, btw) and it did nothing. The file still reported 900+ MB.

Look in Size on Disc in the properties. Should be a couple of MB.

when ever i use windows compression it seems to just shave off a few kilabytes,is there away to adjust how much you can compress it by?

I dunno what wrong with the compression for you guys. For me, it usually compresses down to 1 - 2 MB

It depends on the file Glenbo, if a file is full of non-uniformed data it wont compress by much as it wont find a good algorithm to use to compress it by much.


If you use a file full of zero's it will compress it really tight.