Creating or sharing compressed/reduced version of games

[JustLooking123]

Hi!
Many good games takes a lot of space on disk, just because of some FMVs, uncompressed music, voice acting or even some times dummy files!
While these sound like great aesthetics, after playing them once or twice, we might find them unnecessary anymore, especially intros... and most of them can be watched in internet easily... but carrying multi-hundred megs around just for them is too much, especially if we are archiving lot of games...

In the past, there was some sites which provided highly compressed games, but nowadays they are hard to find... and the term is abused as clickbait, without giving any download link in the end!

So I ask if anyone is interested in creating or sharing compressed/reduced versions of games?
The goal is to:

• Removing (or compressing) unnecessary FMVs
• Removing voice acts
• Compressing/downgrading BGMs
• Compressing/downgrading images and textures if they take too much space
• Retain quality of game as much as possible

Doing these might be easy in some games and challenging in others, but i think it's a good challenge and worthy to even have contests for it!

A place which I found myself was This Page, which is about PSX games only, the guy really has cut everything to bone! and even used unordinary compression methods to compress roms, requiring some shabby tools to uncompress them before use... this is too extreme! but nevertheless fascinating to see how 800mb games are reduced to about 10mb! while retaining almost all important things!
Well, i'm not talking about this level of extremity, yet i believe those games can easily reduced to about 100mb without much sacrifice...

Thanks in advance.

 

[fake-kun]

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Save_disk_space_for_ISOs

 

[JustLooking123]

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Save_disk_space_for_ISOs

Thanks! And yes, while using tools like CHDMAN might be considered "user-friendly enough", the truth is lots of people have hard time for even extracting 7-zip archived games! which is apparent in comments section of games...
Now consider trimming and scrubbing, or more advanced things like compressing BGMs and/or FMVs...
Finding unused files, trial and errors, etc, etc, etc...

These are not something which we can expect normal people to do, and even for advanced users, jumping into all of these hoops is usually time-consuming at best...
Wouldn't it be best for these things to be done once in best way, and shared with everyone?

What i'm thinking about, is a Community-driven service for this purpose.
When a game is shared, things which is done to it should be documented, and the quality and functionality of it can be judged by users too.

It will be valuable, just like how providing pre-patched translations helped many people.

Side note: I'm not sure if the section in which i posted my thread is correct for this purpose or not, if it's in wrong place i'm sorry.

Edit: Added more explanation, and a bit of rewording too.

Thanks.

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

For a lot of DOS cd's, Demos and the like are also incorporated that don't need to be there. Think i crunched out 200Mb from Mechwarrior 2 removing demos and the Win95 components that would never be used on the Dosbox template i was using.

Though if we do, it might be more likely to make xdeltas and share them, they will be very tiny as important data is copied and unimportant data is what the delta removes.

 

[bobobobo]

most FMVs deserve to be purged from the face of the earth, childhood ruining stuff that

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

most FMVs deserve to be purged from the face of the earth, childhood ruining stuff that

Heh.... Most FMV's early on were the result of 'We got CD space, we have 700Mb! Let's fill it with something!' when you before had megabytes in floppy disk form.

Low resolution, low fps, low bpp video, weak compression and dithering, plus mediocre acting and story, that's how most FMV's seem to have played out, usually reaction and interface. Or FMV being used in static conversations/interviews with people.

Then again you were looking at most systems being 100Mhz or less and couldn't really handle more.

 

[JustLooking123]

Heh.... Most FMV's early on were the result of 'We got CD space, we have 700Mb! Let's fill it with something!' when you before had megabytes in floppy disk form.

Low resolution, low fps, low bpp video, weak compression and dithering, plus mediocre acting and story, that's how most FMV's seem to have played out, usually reaction and interface. Or FMV being used in static conversations/interviews with people.

Then again you were looking at most systems being 100Mhz or less and couldn't really handle more.

Very true... and yet, back then, the kid me would have been more than happy to watch them!
Also, just looking at how full a CD was, used to be an indicator of how rich its content might be!
Talk about things that didn't age well... fortunately, those days are gone, and nowadays, we have "modern" versions of them!

Though if we do, it might be more likely to make xdeltas and share them, they will be very tiny as important data is copied and unimportant data is what the delta removes.

Indeed! this way they can be hosted in any legitimated romhacking site too.
The specific format of the patch that needs to be used might vary depending on the game filesystem type, but the idea of the patch is great nonetheless!
With all technical hassles already handled, just applying the patch should be easy enough for anyone.
And who knows, maybe one day they'll even find their way to RGT too!