Archiving Games and Apps

[a55m0nk]

Lu all

How would I go about ripping my games and applications into very small file sizes (by very small i mean in comparison to the original 650mb). I have seen it done before in compressing games to 200mb and under with full functionality, and was just wondering how I could achieve an archive on a DVD disc for example with 20 or so full CDs on it.

Regards
a55m0nk

[tbaher]

Compression (with or without "full functionality") ratios depend largely on what you are compressing. Nevermind the different algorithms/programs, some content just compresses better than others. Like if a game has a folder with 400 MB of wave files for instance or BMP files or just plain text, there is gonna be good ratios. The problem with today's games is that they already come on multiple CDs, and so I assume (since this IS 2004) that most of these games have MP3s, etc instead of audio tracks and compressed-to-all-heck textures, etc. and I'm just talking about the ones that run off of the CDs.
Things that run off of the hard drive with the CD only used for copy protection usually have everything ultra-compressed and then unloads all of that content on the hard drive (anyone seen Armed and Dangerous's install footprint? 3GB for a 2 CD game, or so i heard) but I digress.

Bottom line, Farstone Virtual Drive (to name one - one that stinks at 1:1 copies no-less) lets you compress the image files you make, but the ratio is so variable that you could be saving 10 MB or 400 MB.
To get this 400 MB though you have to have a CD that is very compressable (games that have regular-AVIs for FMV and BMPs/TGAs for textures)

Forget about the 20 CDs that are compressed down to 235 MB to fit in a 4.7 GB DVD-R

/rant

Buy an extra 120 GB hard drive or two and you won't have to worry about fetching CDs (assuming you WERE willing to get cracks for all your original games) or worry about that dodgy drive (like my creative crap dvd) that won't read a lot of CDs without spitting them out a few times.

/bad advice

[a55m0nk]

Thankyou for your reply, but what about the game ripping communities? I am in no way affiliated with these persons but how do they acheive such high compression?

I have friends who use peer to peer networks to get their games (I can't stand that, I always need a hard copy of my game ) and they are downloading fully functional games at 300 and under mb a peice. Is this purely image-audio-video compression or is there another factor involved?

Any help would be muchly appreciated

a55m0nk

[Joe Forster/STA]

Hi Assmonk,

When you rip a game then there are several issues that allow you to make the rip significantly smaller than the original. These are:

1. Omit data that is not essential to play the game. This includes intros, cutsenes and other movies/videos; soundtrack, speech, ambient sounds and other audio; support for languages other than English; etc. With this, the uncompressed, playable game already becomes smaller than the original.

2. Use special multimedia or some lossy algorithm for compressing files. This includes UHARC for audio in WAV files or textures in, say, BMP, TGA etc. files; MP3 compression of audio files; JPG compression of texture files. With these, you can achieve several times higher compression ratio than with the standard archivers: RAR and ACE.

3. If the audio and/or video is already compressed (MP3, OGG, MPEG, AVI, JPG, GIF) then recompress them with a higher compression ratio (lower bitrate, lower quality).

There are surely some more but I don't remember them at the moment. These are the most important ones anyway. Bye,

Joe