8 replies to this topic

[seebs]

I'm in the midle of migrating from Gamedrive to Alcohol.

I can't help but notice that many disks are substantially larger in Alcohol 120% than they were in Gamedrive, which offers a compression feature.

While obviously most disks have a great deal of compression already, there seems to be some room for this. For instance, the disks for Arcanum are between them something over 250MB smaller in Gamedrive files than in Alcohol files. That's something, especially to someone hoping to fit a large number of files on a laptop.

[MaLing]

I have had a thought about your idea.

A compressed image can save more space in a hard disc drive. It is a good point.

Another point of mine is:
Some protection schemes can not be burnt to backup discs at the moment, e.g. SafeDisc 4, SecuRom 7. We need to burn the images to CDRs (or DVDRs) as files using Nero.

However, a raw file is always bigger. If a CD/DVD disc image is bigger than 700MB (4.3GB), then we need to split the image and store them into two discs, but then we can not directly mount these images from the disc to play. Compression of images is a good way to overcome that.

Nevertheless, there is a drawback:
When we use a virtual drive to mount a compressed image, in a either hard disc drive or CD/DVD drive, then Alcohol needs to perform an immediate decompression of the image while we install and play from this image. The higher rate the image is compressed at, the slower the performance of the game will be (especially when the image is in a CD/DVD drive), or it even causes unpreditable problems. In addition, we need to buy a higher performace computer.

A way to overcome that is to make Alcohol be able to mount multiple split-images at once as a single, complete image. This idea is just raised by another recent topic in this forum. However, I think this function is too complicated to accomplish at the moment, so please do not take it too seriously.

Edited by MaLing, 27 October 2005 - 06:37 AM.

[Charalambos]

This function is already supported by Alcohol for DVD images( you must use the option "Separate every..." in Alcohol's Image Making Wizard). These multiple split images can be used as any other by mounting their .mds file to a virtual drive, provided that all their parts are in the same folder.

[MaLing]

Oh, this is a great function!

Perhaps then Alcohol should split CD images too.

Furthermore, if the image is split and stored in two CDs/DVDs, it would be nice to mount these files in multiple CD/DVD drives at the same time, so that users do not need to copy the files from CD/DVD discs to hard disc drive.

[seebs]

Even a fairly naive compression scheme ought to be orders of magnitude faster than reading from physical media, so I wouldn't be too worried about that. It just seems as though compressing images would be awfully nice for us laptop users.

[Qyngali]

Even a fairly naive compression scheme ought to be orders of magnitude faster than reading from physical media, so I wouldn't be too worried about that.  It just seems as though compressing images would be awfully nice for us laptop users. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well you could use NTFS compression...

[LocutusofBorg]

there is already work in progress for compression-support

[freddy123]

Please do not plug other companies products here. This is Alcohol-Soft's forum, not theirs.

Thank you.

Edited by zamiel, 03 January 2006 - 08:35 AM.

[MaLing]

Well, while it could be a kind advice to users, it would not be a good idea to introduce other competitive programmes in Alcohol's forum.

Edited by MaLing, 03 January 2006 - 06:18 AM.