mark_k wrote:Thanks for that. Perhaps that could be an enhancement for a future version:
When using zipped ROMs, have an option to only unzip the trimmed length of the ROM. That should save time and reduce wear on the SD card.
Yes, that makes sense. I'll see about getting that in.
mark_k wrote:Also, I may as well use this thread to give a suggestion relating to the Enable uncompress to file option. When I tested that (it was a while ago using the trial version of DraStic), it seemed that every time I chose a new game, DraStic unzipped the archive to a temp file in its directory on the SD card, deleting the previous unzipped game file. That can take a very long time.
Apart from making loading games very slow if you switch between games a lot, that causes a lot of wear to the SD card. How about an option to do this:
- Automatically uncompress archives, but if the uncompressed file already exists in DraStic's directory use that directly instead of unzipping.
- Don't delete any uncompressed files automatically.
The use case for this would be if the user has a large-capacity SD card with plenty of free space (e.g. 128GB). They can store their games zipped, but as they play each game the already-unzipped files will be used more and more. If in future space becomes a little tight, the user can use a file manager to delete some unzipped ROMs to save space, retaining the ability to play those games in future (since DraStic would automatically unzip the game if needed).
The thing is, if the app uncompresses every ROM it'll defeat the purpose of supporting compressed ROMs in the first place since you'll no longer be saving space. Actually, it'll be worse since you'll now have both the compressed and uncompressed files taking up space. If you have a huge SD card and don't care about wasting the space it's by far in your best interest to manually decompress the ROMs.
The best compromise may be to allow a user configurable cache size, where it'll delete previously uncompressed ROMs to make room for new ones in a least recently used fashion.
Of course, the other option is to disable uncompress to storage altogether and rely on uncompressing to RAM, but Android devices are so stingy with address space this can quickly become an issue even on devices with a lot of RAM. It's something worth trying though; recent versions should uncompress to file if uncompress to RAM fails, but sometimes memory failure isn't graceful or obvious and therefore it'll still just crash later.