English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Possibility for opening .RAR'ed ADF files directly, as with .ZIP'ed ADFs

12 April 2004, 01:37

I don't think the problem would be the implementation of adding a UnRAR features, the problem is how people use RAR's rather than ZIP's.

You only get the additional compression benefits of RARing ADF's if you RAR multiple titles together, especially in a ordered sequence with lot's of near-duplicates and alternate copies that share many bytes of data - e.g. Games (A).

These files are stored in a Solid Archive for the compression to really benefit - when the file is extracted it can take a while as it has to analyse all files stored before it. This can take a while.

So RAR's are mostly used for mass archiving of games, to say burn to CD.

If you have a PC fast enough to UnRAR single files from solid archives anyway, then no doubt you have the money to buy a hard disk to store them as zip's in the first place.

12 April 2004, 01:37	#2
Jim Posts: n/a	I don't think the problem would be the implementation of adding a UnRAR features, the problem is how people use RAR's rather than ZIP's. You only get the additional compression benefits of RARing ADF's if you RAR multiple titles together, especially in a ordered sequence with lot's of near-duplicates and alternate copies that share many bytes of data - e.g. Games (A). These files are stored in a Solid Archive for the compression to really benefit - when the file is extracted it can take a while as it has to analyse all files stored before it. This can take a while. So RAR's are mostly used for mass archiving of games, to say burn to CD. If you have a PC fast enough to UnRAR single files from solid archives anyway, then no doubt you have the money to buy a hard disk to store them as zip's in the first place.