So I'm ripping all of my PS2 games and I noticed that the Sonic Mega Collection Plus is a whole 4.7GB, filling the entire DVD. Given that it's a collection of Genesis games, what could be taking up all that space?
A few dozen megabytes for the games and the launcher
About 1GB in video files
3GB in a file called _DUMMY_.BIN which contains nothing but NUL bytes
If they'd gone with fewer movies they could have just fit this on a CD, of course
love how Rez, a long interactive-mix techno album with a 3D shooter game attached, is a 192MB CD
and a collection of 13 Genesis ROMs is a 4.7GB DVD
love how Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is 1.3GB for a mediocre puzzle game
FWIW at least among my collection it's pretty rare for a game to fill the entire DVD, and when it does it's usually likely to be using the storage legitimately.
@fluffy This is why the Dolphin emulator devs implemented a unique lossless compressed disc format to crunch junk data especially well. An extreme but real example (and the only game I ever worked on that saw store shelves... and it shouldn't have). How often does a file compress to under 0.3% of original size?
Interestingly, Windows' built-in file compression brings this particular ISO down to about 0.6%. RVZ outperforms greatly on games with non-contiguous junk.
@fluffy Oops, used WIA instead of ISO. Still, uncompressed disc image either way.
@fluffy Ah, here's a much better example, and displayed in a way that makes more sense for it: