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[dosraider]

Even then, _r.u.s.s., I know several sites where you can download plenty full ISOs, as probably many of you, they all use zip or rar.
n00b_compability is the key word.
And don't FORCE peeps into yet another format.

[Eagle of Fire]

Nothing which been said in this thread is new, I heard it all 3 years ago.

Size of games will get huge in the future? This been said 3 years ago, I'm yet to see any proof of that. If we ever get to that point, that's why ripped versions been created anyways.

[Sebatianos]

Originally Posted by Adamg

I noticed that Abandonia still generally uses .zip archives for all of the downloads.

What do you mean still generally uses? All game archives on Abandonia should be ZIPped. It's just a question is some extract to their own folder or if they don't.

Why is this? As mentioned before - user friendliness. Believe it or not, many people don't even know what WinZip is and extract directly via WinXP extractor (which isn't even able to extract all zipped files - I remember a few games The Horseman compressed, wouldn't decompress with WinXP extractor and some guests went into panic).

And about archive size - games like Death Gate are great examples. The full game (with all the high-er resolution video and speach files...) is much larger then the version on the site, yet it doesn't hinder the gameplay. In fact, if somebody isn't sure weather ot give the game a go or not, such a person in more likely to download the ripped version (smaller file to download simply to try).

And I think it happened only once, that a game really got rejected because of its size. It was Magic the Gathering: Shandalar. It was on the site for about 6 hours before Kosta took it down (because it took up too much space - among other things). It wasn't a problem, since it turned out to be ESA protected anyway (but that was a few weeks before the famous ESA clean-up).

So why switch to any other compression tools to convert the archives on the site? For personal use - sure thing, most of our regulars started using it about three years ago, about the time (the EoF mentioned) the previous simular debate was held on the topic.

[Geezer]

Originally Posted by Doink

Abandoned games will be getting much larger so I thought it would be a good idea to get a headstart.

While I agree with this statement I think the bigger question is whether Abandonia will ever host ISO (or any of the other CD image compressions). There are still plenty of old DOS games not on the site that are small enough to host. We won't run out of games any time in the near future. The issue will be as each year passes very few of the newly eligible games will qualify because we are at the point now (1993 and on) where most anything of any quality was released on CD. The first abandonware site that has the bandwidth to be able to host CD based games is going to become very popular very fast.

I guess my point is that the compression method chosen today is not the issue and will do nothing to prepare Abandonia for what is going to transpire. A new business model will need to develop and the bandwidth technology and availability will no doubt have to change.

[Sebatianos]

Originally Posted by JMB

I guess my point is that the compression method chosen today is not the issue and will do nothing to prepare Abandonia for what is going to transpire. A new business model will need to develop and the bandwidth technology and availability will no doubt have to change.

Abandonia was names The Home of Abandoned DOS games. There aren't all that many DOS games that would reqire a full CD image to be played. So I don't really feel it would be necesary to change this.

But the ISO cellar in a way indicates that people are aware of the need to change.

Hopefully there will be a sort of a sister site that would deal with full disk images only (like ISOdonia or something), similarly as Reloaded focuses on Freeware games (it's a completely different story with freeware then with abandonware - although pre-Reloaded fan made titles were put on Abandonia as well).

[Geezer]

ISOdonia has a nice ring to it. :laugh:

[Luchsen]

I would go for Sea Diimages or Sea de Images or Sea of the Images. But nobody understands this, and actually it's plain stupid.

[Scatty]

Originally Posted by JMB

The first abandonware site that has the bandwidth to be able to host CD based games is going to become very popular very fast.

LTF - Abandonware France Check out The 7th Guest (click on on the right side)

For the ISO Cellar it's of course a good idea to use for people who upload the archives with images, but they might want to convert the archive to a self-extracting SFX archive in such a case, to still keep it more user-friendly with unfamiliar formats.
Even so, better yet than 7z might be KGB Archiver. Just as slow for best compression, just as memory and CPU hungry, but claims to have the strongest encryption. I personally tested one ISO with WinRAR and KGB and WinRAR has won, but it took me hours so it might be different with different files, I didn't have the patience to test something else.

[Juanca]

Originally Posted by Mighty Midget

Whatever AB do now, I think that with the number of bugs still not sorted out, any changes that make things more complicated are not a good idea. If AB decides to change the zips to 7zip, they should wait until AB gets back into the top position as a user friendly site.

totally agree with you.

[Adamg]

Hmmm, I wasn't expecting so many people to be against changing it. :worried: It's true that decompression times for 7Zip files are higher, but we're talking about less than a minute, generally. (Except for large archives.) The 1-2GB maximum memory requirement would be only for the person doing the compression, the end-user could get by with 256MB - 512MB without much, if any, impact.

It is true that since most of the downloads are already quite small, the difference in download times with 7zip, or UHarc, would generally be insignificant. It would, however, still reduce overall bandwidth usage by about 10-20% (Hopefully.).

The goal, of course, is to reduce the bandwidth usage and not inconvenience anyone. I don't believe 7Zip has very good support for creating self-extracting archives. I'll download UHarc and see if it's compression is better than 7Zip, and if it supports creating self-extracting archives.

I'll download MDK from here (86MB), and compare the file sizes for the Zip to the best compression I can get with 7Zip and UHarc. I'll also time the decompression for each format. I'll post the results here in about half an hour or so.

P.S. Does anyone know the average monthly bandwidth usage of Abandonia, and how much it costs?