Most roms are a certain size (the chip's size) and you can use anything up to that amount and then the rest of the space will be FF or 00 so if you look at the size of a dump it will be 256 or 512 or whatever, the blank parts are read out and take up space. But the more blank space they use the better they will compress in zip because it just tells it 00x1million instead of 00 00 00 00......