Compression?

[Purist]

Is it possible to use compression on gp2x files and still use them normally? Windows can do this easily with the ntfs format but the gp2x can't read this format.
Are there any linux equivalents of this that can be used on the GP2x? Such as ext2 or ext3 with a patch of the operating system?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/e2compr/

 

[tshroom]

I believe some emulators read compressed roms, but I would guess the specific app on the 2x would need to support being read or executed while in a compressed format.

 

[BradN]

I think there's some filesystems intended for ROM that can compress data - but you can't change them after the filesystem is made. Even ISO9660 has a transparent decompression extention.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, it would certainly be possible to code an .gpe compressor.

 

[Yono]

Well at it would certainly be possible to code an .gpe compressor.

Something like...this? Thanks for the archives ED.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well at it would certainly be possible to code an .gpe compressor.

Something like...this? Thanks for the archives ED.

Umm... yes

 

[tshroom]

Wow. How cool. is it stable?

 

[yaustar]

yes, but it takes a while for the GP2X to uncompress it.

 

[Purist]

Cool. I just compressed all my .gpe's. Is there something that can compress the whole sd card and still use it?

 

[Shikaku]

Cool. I just compressed all my .gpe's. Is there something that can compress the whole sd card and still use it?

Well, if you have Gngeo2x games with graphics dumps, you can delete the *c#.* files from the zip files with graphics dumps and rezip them so they save space.

*c#.* means:

[anything goes here]c[some #, 1 up to 8].rom or bin

 

[Ranma13]

Cool. I just compressed all my .gpe's. Is there something that can compress the whole sd card and still use it?

I think you're misunderstanding how compression works. When something is compressed, you can't use it in that state. You can only uncompress it and then use it like that. XP does that transparently so you don't see it compressing and uncompressing your files, but you will notice a noticeable slowdown when accessing files on a compressed drive vs. one that's not.

Compression on the GP2X is not too useful because in the end you still have to uncompress the data to use it, and with the limited amount of RAM that the GP2X has, it's not worth it. Note that this does not mean that using zipped ROMs is not worth it, because ROM files are usually small, it's worth it to just uncompress it and store it in RAM for fast access. But with things like programs and whatnot, you don't want to be sitting there waiting for it to uncompress just so you can use it.

 

[BradN]

The program linked is an executable compressor - the resulting program decompresses itself to memory and then runs.