> Space maybe but speed definitely matters for future chd compression/use. There's a > reason the original PC based arcade games didn't have their data all zipped.
that's not strictly true, plenty of games did have compressed data
there are also logical reasons to do it, if you're dealing with streamed data then you don't want i/o to become a bottleneck, so if you can stream compressed audio and decompress it you're using less i/o time than streaming uncompressd audio. For certain types of data it's also faster in general to load + decompress than load a larger block of data (eg large amounts of text, if you load a dictionary first, then only have to load lookup to words, it's a faster than reading raw data)
also drive access speeds improve all the time, the majority of arcade systems that are viable targets had slower drives anyway.
yeah, it could be an issue, but it's definitely not a black/white thing.
there are of course other interesting cases when it comes to i/o bandwidth, with GTA5 it's recommended you DON'T do a full HDD install on an Xbox 360, the logic behind this seems to be that you end up i/o bound streaming everything from the HDD, but if you stream some data from the DVD and other data from the HDD at the same time you have more i/o bandwidth.
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