Emulator

Description

What's the problem? Describe what went wrong.

Currently, compressing a game is a destructive operation when it could be not.

As dolphin found out long ago, to be able to compress a Wii game, you need to remove the 'random' data nintendo inserted, so reversing the inserter would make the operation lossless.

Moreover, i'm hoping that .DAT files standardize on dolphin compression checksums for scrubbed discs in order for projects like RA to end up with the right metadata, so having a complete stable solution for the scrub/unscrub roundtrip would be a good standardization advantage.

edit: even better would be to support playing games with the .iso.dec (NASOS) format, because that executable scrubs and unscubs, and there are already redump dats with their md5sums for other projects to use.

I honestly have no preference in which one gets in, only that one does and a dat exists for it.

Dec has the 'advantage' that it makes the files 'really' smaller, not just zero or 'FF' the holes which is more useful when the filesystem has support for spare files or the games are on zips (which they aren't necessarily on).

Dolphin could make me very happy by adding instrumentation collecting the md5sum before the invertible scrub, the md5sum after the scrub and upload it somewhere so it's easy to connect redump etc to the scrubbed disks. Could be useful for the wiki and bug reports too.

BTW, i was wondering does the typical sparse file implementation on unix filesystems works with FF as it does with 00? If no, it might be better to use '00' and maybe break 'compatibility' with some unscrubbers (that may not work anyway) on your format if you decide scrub instead of remove space.

Also it's really weird that this bug database uses 'edit' to post new replies.