NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

๐Ÿฅ I am not embroiled in any legal battle
๐Ÿฆ other than battles that are legal ๐ŸŽฎ

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

it's cool that zip compression is just automatically part of so many things. like, there are better algorithms, and not everything benefits from being compressed, but as a Default Way Of Doing Things, there are worse options.

i remember that 15 years ago, if you downloaded a bunch of videogame ROMs and found out they had all been put in their own individual zips, you had to extract them all. now emulators, flash carts, and even the MiSTer all read the files directly out of the archive. I'm sure there's some overhead to this and it probably bugs the devs, but it's what needed to happen and it pretty much Just Works.


ecn
@ecn

Aside from its widespread support (or maybe due to it?) Zip is also the base for a ton of file formats.

Microsoft Office docs? Zip. Java JARs? Zip. iOS app files? Zips. Nuget packages? Zips. I know there's more I'm missing but the great thing is you can just change the extension and extract.

Heck, theres's even a meme for this.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

.zip is the only directory format all OSes respect


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

fun fact when ingesting large numbers of small files it's actually much faster to directly read them from a ZIP file than it is to read them as flat files from the file system in OSX

one of the weirdest build system optimizations i was peripherally involved in was when we just zipped all the intermediate inputs and outputs to make everything faster

I recently re-installed quake from the original cd, and had to 'de-ice' the quake files (which were so small I wasn't sure they could contain the engine + content of the whole game at 25MB! goes to show how bloated things are now) and it required the deice.exe decompressor, which is 16 bit, so I had to run it under DosBox. Really like that zip has become so ubiquitous.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

most emulators just write contents of the zip file to disk before starting it, that's why a lot of retropie distributions you'd run from an sd card or emmc disable this feature

but yeah that means theres not really any overhead there while you're playing