1964 will support new compression of winzip9 ?

[MrRCS]

1964 will support new compression of winzip9 ?

 

[karth95]

edit: Well, I get to eat some crow.

it's not new compression, it's just a method to allow more than 65000 files in a zip archive. As such, it's not something that will happen with n64 roms.

If someone was crazy enough to dup out enough n64 roms to do that, it would still work, since zlib has already been updated to handle those 64 bit extensions.

 

[MrRCS]

ok

 

[The Khan Artist]

I'd like to see 7-Zip support, personally. Deflate64 would be nice, too, but I'd have to take that up with the zlib people.

 

[karth95]

well, I imagine if someone coded a dll version of 7-zip, it might be possible.

 

[The Khan Artist]

7-zip already has all the compression/decompression routines in external DLLs.

 

[pandamoan]

7-zip already has all the compression/decompression routines in external DLLs.

yeah, i'd just incorporate all the 7z dlls. then i could make all my roms into .7z files and save a gb or so.

hey, why not?

http://www.7-zip.org/

i love these guys. i've always hated dealing with online compression, even since the BBS days, but these guys are making it cool for once.

 

[oDD]

it's not new compression, it's just a method to allow more than 65000 files in a zip archive. As such, it's not something that will happen with n64 roms.

Umm wrong, a little reading wouldn't go astray.

Improved compression
WinZip 9.0 supports the "enhanced deflate" compression method. This compression method provides greater compression and reduces the size of your Zip files, saving you data transmission time and valuable disk space.

Note: versions of WinZip prior to WinZip 8.1 will not be able to extract files compressed with this new method.

So yes if someone was to recompress their rom set with Winzip 9.0 then 1964 wouldn't be able to read them. Though I'm sure zlib will be updated soon enough.

 

[karth95]

so they are saying they are breaking the zip standard and calling them zip files anyway?

 

[The Khan Artist]

Nah, zip can use several different compression routines. The only ones supported by zlib (and most zipping programs) are store, implode, and deflate. Deflate provides the best compression currently. However, there are two other less-commonly-supported encoding schemes: BZip2 and Deflate64. A few programs support Deflate64, such as 7-Zip and PowerArchiver, and this is most likely what WinZip 9 will have. zlib does not currently support it. 7-Zip can also use BZip2 encoding in zip files, but I don't think anything else can decompress those at this point in time.

Having Deflate64 support in WinZip will be a good thing, IMO, because it will become more common. Hopefully this will provide the impetus needed to get the zlib team to support it.

 

[LazerTag]

Standards change. Just recently I came accross a RAR file that required me to go get the latest version. Sounds like kinda same thing happening with ZIP.

 

[karth95]

RAR has always been that way. Zip is based on a set of standards, which include the types Khan listed above. Zip hasn't changed those standards in forever, since it would invalidate the installed base of hundreds of millions of zip users.

 

[ingonab]

Zip is based on a set of standards, which include the types Khan listed above. Zip hasn't changed those standards in forever, since it would invalidate the installed base of hundreds of millions of zip users.

Writing a new standard is costly. The Zip standard has always allowed for certain changes (extensions), both for this reason, and for prolonging its own life. It isn't often that new compression routines are added to Zip however. This might be for avoiding confusion among the millions of zip users, or maybe because it just isn't necessary. Nonetheless, changes will always become necessary over time.