Support (n)NASOS decompression for Gamecube and Wii games like 7z is supported to save A LOT of storage and A LOT of time

Issue #3312 new
Merlijn Wissink created an issue

Most rom files are stored as either .zip or .7z files which works perfectly fine. However, due to the junk-data in gamecube and wii iso's being semi-random, compressing those roms using the standard zip or 7z doesn't help a whole lot. At most you save a few hundred MB (of the 1.35GB or 4.5GB).

However, there is a special tool designed to compress (and decompress) Gamecube and WII games: http://romshepherd.com/index.php/topic,6092.0.html

It's called nNASOS and the results are amazing. For example a test of my own on a Gamecube game:

Drome Racers (USA).iso = 1.35GB

  • Standard 7z: compressed to 1.10 GB in ~3 minutes (on an Intel 4690K)
  • nNASOS: compressed to 821MB in 19 seconds

  • Standard 7z: decompression in ~2 minutes.

  • nNASOS: decompression in 15 seconds.

As you can see the storage savings and time savings are great compared to 7z. And there are games out there which compress even more, this was just a random example. The problem is that the emulator (which is probably Dolphin in 99.9999% of the cases :P) does not support the compressed .dec format thus if you want to play a compressed game you have to decompress it manually.

So, I thought Launchbox would be the perfect tool to support it as it also supports pre-launch 7z extraction.

And I don't suspect it being very difficult to implement either as nNASOS is (currently at least) a simple console application which probably can easily be called from within Launchbox.

If Launchbox would support this it would be (as far as I know) the only frontend with such a feature and it would be possible to save hundreds upon hundreds of gigabytes for the storage of gamecube and wii files.

If this is something you'd like to implement, it can't come soon enough because I'm currently collecting all the Gamecube games ;)

Thanks!

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