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OG Xbox Forums => Software Forums => Development => Topic started by: limbfilter on January 10, 2003, 05:59:00 PM
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Sorry to say it's not a new idea. But consider the fact that you only have 64MB of ram on the xbox. And if it could run it would do so very slowly.
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It would work if you have a more powerful system but if you were looking to increase loadtimes massively this would be a way to do it.
To extract a zip takes long enough on my p4 2.4 so it would be hard enough on my xbox
LepPpeR
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This can be done by creating a .zip decoding library of some sort in the bios, however the problems are that this would cause MAJOR slow-down to decompress on the fly, and with the lack of a vm system one could not simply cache te files as a preload. An example of a model for this would be the quake3 engine which uses .zip compressed .pk3 files as filing system. the engine can read headers off the .zip realtime, but to actually retreve a file, that file is decompressed dynamically into memory, then used as needed by the engine.
A more practical application would be adding xiso filing system support as by definition .iso uses no compression and can be logically accessed as files. To add support for this in the xbox, a full virtual drive system would have to be created, this in itself creates problems, as choosing files to mount would require a dashboard frontend, but actually mounting them would have to be a feature of the bios. the xbox itself will recognize more drive letters than are already being used, as well as multiple physical drives- the best choice might be to emulate the .iso as hdd1.
Still the impracticality of it all makes it more a question of, "does anyone really need this... other than to save 15 minutes on their pc". Even the xdk was intended to run the files raw off the hard drive for testing.
Just my 2ยข