20 replies to this topic

[Ntropy]

Hi!


I'm an usual user of your alcohol 120% program, :woot: and i'm very happy with it, and i want to make you a little suggestion to improve your great program: i would like to have the possibility of make a compressed image of a disc, to save space on the disc, or to fit two small images onto a single CD, without the annoyance of having to compress the image with an external program like WinZIP or others.
I have found others programs with this feature , like this: http://www.cdrom-emu..._cde_requir.htm but i don't want to stop using alcohol because of the other great features your program have.

[MadAtom]

I think this is is great idea !!
I´m looking for a program able to make compressed CDs images, but I still haven´t found one.
This is a great feature every program that make CD image would have, and there would be a lot of users very pleased with it.
Also, others Alcohol users, like amax, ask about this feature.

[Lvsitano]

Compressing the image in ZIP format would take much more time to create the image, and maybe you would only save a few megabytes.

[luciano]

Compressing 3 images using winrar I saved only 15MB and it took 1h and 30min!!

[Smabbage]

If you want to save backup images of your games, DVD is the way to go. I can save about 5 images on one DVD. :woot:

[luciano]

on a DVD? 6 images

[Smabbage]

Oh. Ummm...6 then.

[Zarathustra]

depends on the size of the images

but apart from that, I wanted to contribute to the real discussion here too...

The images may not be compressed, but their content will be in most cases.

Current games need much space on your harddisc, often more than a gigabyte although it comes only on one CD. If the data wasn't compressed, it would eat up much more than 700MB for distribution, which would mean the publisher would have to go for 2 or more CDs, which would mean the production costs would raise (and the profit would drop). But as the data is already compressed, there's not much you can gain from compressing again.

So imho it's understandable that the developers don't bother to implement a compression option into Alcohol, it is simply a waste of time.

If you still want to compress your images, you can still use Windows' built-in compression. Either create a separate partition and compress it with Drive-Space (if you're using Win9x) or compress the folder you're storing your images in (if you're using Win2k/XP). But it'll be the same as if you tried to compress MP3s - they're also "precompressed" by their codec so the gain will be marginal.


sG

[ZombieKIL]

Simple buy more hard drives!!!

I have 6x 80gb in one computer and 8x 80gb in other
going to change them to 200gb soon

[luciano]

200x6=1,2TB :woot: :woot: :woot:

[Max]

Most newly created games are compressed indeed, but not older ones, for imaging storing on DVD and other Big Media, a standard compressed bin format could give a big margin.
Most bins are using 2352 bytes per sector instead 2048, storing crc and error correction. This information is useless if the sector is not protected, and it can be created from the original 2048 bytes, you can gain space from there, and also the data stream will compress better if the error correction is not there.
I propose a compressed bin standard using zlib and the above technique. I think it will be not difficult to implement.

[Sentinel]

I can only speak for myself, but I don't just use Alcohol to make backups of games, I use it for all of my CDs many of which would benefit significantly from compression. As more people move to writable DVD there will be an ever growing need to archive existing CD-ROM collections to DVD media.

I find it strange that nearly every other CD-ROM emulator on the market (except perhaps CDMate) has some form of compression support whilst creating images. I also do not believe it is a particularly difficult feature to implement, especially given the skills of the programmers.

This is not the first time this feature has been requested since the birth of Alcohol (by myself and others) but with no luck so far.

Having two seperate CD emulators installed, one for games one for other data seems somewhat silly.

Please, please, please implement this feature! :flower:

Thanks

[luciano]

Most newly created games are compressed indeed, but not older ones, for imaging storing on DVD and other Big Media, a standard compressed bin format could give a big margin.
Most bins are using 2352 bytes per sector instead 2048, storing crc and error correction. This information is useless if the sector is not protected, and it can be created from the original 2048 bytes, you can gain space from there, and also the data stream will compress better if the error correction is not there.
I propose a compressed bin standard using zlib and the above technique. I think it will be not difficult to implement.

just use the iso image type

[Lord Kane]

Well there is anothe Virtual drive software that does d ocompression, but htat has other issues that make me want to switch to Alcohol. However, the issue is that I am short on HDD space for this. Many of my images will compress reasonably well with WinRar 2.x. Tthe reason I mention this is that there is a CD plugin for playstation emulators that provides support for running bZipped and Rar(2.x)ed images on the fly. I don't know if it's of any help, but : http://mooby.psxfanatics.com/

[BigTy]

5 6 7 who care just be like me and build a server for your images and other programs. no fus no mus as a matter of fact i need to go get another 120mb drive next week im running out of space. :woot: :tu:

[Sentinel]

....as a matter of fact i need to go get another 120mb drive next week im running out of space. :woot:  :tu:

Exactly! Wouldn't it be nice to have the option to make images as small as possible in order to maximise storage potential regardless of media? That way I have the choice to decide the trade off between size/speed/CPU usage/Final storage media depending which is most important to me with a particular image. As most of my images are rarely used image size is the most important factor to me.

I've already tried hosting a number of Alcohol images on a server using NTFS compression and it does a terrible job of compression - 30% on anything would be a miracle compared to over 60% on the same CD image using another product. Although this is clearly the fault of Microsoft's second rate compression methods, it's not like you can use NTFS on CD/DVD media anyway

In the meantime I'll have to stay with two CD Emulator products installed which is horrible! :woot:

Edited by Sentinel, 27 May 2003 - 09:48 AM.

[BigTy]

lets put it like this it isnt the images that taking the room . got ot love movies hahahahaha :woot: :ninja2: plus you always have winrar if you really want to compress it

Edited by BigTy, 27 May 2003 - 01:32 PM.

[Sentinel]

Yeah, but first I would have to expand the winrar image to a temporary location before I can mount it.

It works well for saving space on DVD but I wouldn't call it convenient

Hey BigTy - It sounds like you spend a lot of cash on movies! :whistle:

[Andareed]

Have you tried creating an ntfs partition just for images? Then enable compression for the drive. Maybe that will save some space...

[Lord Kane]

That doesn't really help me as the bulk of my space is on a Linux based fileserver. Hence why bzip2 or Rar2 compression would really benefit me