Guide to selfbooting 45000 LBA DATA/DATA images

[Xiaopang]

well, depends...i have ripped disc one (everything included) to 95mins and disc 4 (digest movie mono-ized and french and spanish language files kicked out) to 97,5mins. still, i could have optimized disc 4 to keep all language files and still keep it at 97,5mins. why 97,5mins? because thats the max my dc can read. may be other models can read more. would be cool, because i also mastered a sb-rip of spacechannel 5 which was 99:59 big. if a dc could read that far, that would provide me with 22MB more space. thats a huge amount for so highly stacked games like shenmue.

anyways, i still have to rip disc 2 and 3 of shenmue 2. disc 2 is 968MB in size, but i managed to downsize it to 870MB and still keeping all files. this would already be enough to burn that sucker without bootcode to a 99min disc, but that would only be useful for storing reasons. so for disc 2 and 3 the multiple language files would have to go. you can't downsample the sound though. as i already mentioned, shenmue doesn't use soundfiles, but only samples...tens of thousands of them and all are like 5-20kb each. to save a remarkable amount of data, you'd have to downsample thousands of samples, and even then i'd doubt that this would save enough to bring this baby down to 80min. i could also imagine that the sound player shenmue uses is so specialized, that downsampling the sound banks might break their playability for the player, but thats just a theory. compressing the menus wouldn't save you much space. the menu's size plus subtitles and discchanging screens is only 4,5MB. so there's not much to save there. i tried it though. the menu stuff is compressed with gzip, but they already used the best compression. you could try to replace the gzip files with 7z files and the gz-decoding algorithm with a 7z-decoding algorithm. that might downsize the menus a bit further, but that would also be kinda useless, because gzip is really only used for the menus