disks compression compatibility on WHDLoad

[kremiso]

noob question, but is it still available?

or dropped in some release in past?
just wondering which are the actual possibilities to 'shrink' the image disks size less than 880KB, if possible

and about compressing in general, was something different than XPK ever been considered or implemented/ almost implemented?

[Nor Bert]

With today's large hdd/SD/CF drives, shrinking disk images is unnecessary.

[derSammler]

Originally Posted by Nor Bert

With today's large hdd/SD/CF drives, shrinking disk images is unnecessary.

Who says that?

Not wasting space unnecessarily has nothing to do with how much storage you have. It's like saying software no longer needs to be optimized because we have fast CPUs (sadly, that infact seems to be the case more often than not).

As for the actual question: I think slave authors these days rather make the installs rip files instead of still dealing with disk images to save space.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by kremiso

noob question, but is it still available?

or dropped in some release in past?
just wondering which are the actual possibilities to 'shrink' the image disks size less than 880KB, if possible

and about compressing in general, was something different than XPK ever been considered or implemented/ almost implemented?

Largely abandoned because so many games are already compressed that additionally compressing the disk image yields next to no savings, but increases load times and memory usage because of course you need additional memory to depack that image.

[Don_Adan]

You can use XPK from Aminet for pack disk images. But for me this is wasting of time only. I never liked packed disk images, depacking was too slow on my A2000.

[Wepl]

XPK is still supported, you may also use lha/zip archives see https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=103144

[kremiso]

ill do some tries with the VFS, i love the idea behind

yeah many attempts to compress disks lead to almost zero gain, btw there are a good bunch where the size drops down a lot, even just using zip

maybe the zip is lighter on added required memory, compared to xpk

i know all this may sound anacronistic, but im just exploring new paths on old configurations

usual funny attempts

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by derSammler

...As for the actual question: I think slave authors these days rather make the installs rip files instead of still dealing with disk images to save space.

off topic request, but its possible to know which nodos games have a whdload 'files extracted' release?

Shadow of the Beast would be great, as some Team17 major titles

[Wepl]

The speed and gain of xpk depends on the sublibs used. As most of them are written is asm they will be usually faster then lha/zip.
The big advantage of lha/zip is in my opinion that you will have only one file instead of maybe many files on some installs (bit off topic because you asked about disk images). And you can also use lha/zip without compression. I think on an install with many files (e.g. >100 files) PreLoad for lha/zip without compression should be faster than with normal files. This surely also depends on the used amiga filesystem (ffs/afs/sfs/...).

And additional you have the checksums of lha/zip (or xpk) to detect bitrot or transfer errors.