what do these systems all have in common? They all use a regular CD format! Game developers often stored music and other sounds using the Audio-CD format, but it was terribly inefficient when it comes to disc storage as it also had to store the actual game along with the sound files (commonly known as a 'mixed CD'), and these sound files are never compressed because the Audio-CD standard simply doesn't allow for sound compression. PCs, Sega-CD, PC-Engine, PlayStation, Sega Saturn. 13.1.3 FileSystem Deduplication, alternative file systemsĪpplicable to All Platforms Audio-CD.12.1 XEX (Xbox Executable) + Data folder (a.k.a Spilling The ISO Guts).11.2 CIA (CTR Importable Archive, 3DS and DSiWare only).11 Game Boy Advance / Nintendo DS / Nintendo 3DS.9.3 RPX/RPL (aka Installed/Extracted/Loadiine Format).9.1 WUX (Wii U Compressed Image Dump Archive).8.6 FST (extracted File System) - GC/Wii.8.2 RVZ (Modern Dolphin format) - GC/Wii.8.1 GCZ (Dolphin native archive format) - GC/Wii.4.1 Extracted files (aka JB format/GAMES).

3.1 Manual Scrubbing + GZIP Compression.For example, the WBFS format, used for shrinking Wii discs, is not archive-quality since it may be missing padding content and upgrade partitions (which have their uses in 3DS/Wii modding) compared to an intact, uncompressed dump. Compressions that can't be reversed, or those that can be but will have missing or altered content whether it interferes with functionality (rebuilt table of content) or not, are not archive-quality. It's important to take all this into consideration before attempting as most of these are console-specific.Īrchive-quality dumps are ones that when converted back to its original state, will have the same checksum as the official uncompressed release. Some conversions are only playable on specific emulators and may not work on real hardware depending on the console and the method used. There are many ways, some methods alter the data forever while others can be converted back and forth with generally no loss. Most of the information here is based partially on this guide. Naturally, one would want to trim this extra 'fat' as much as possible, which is what this page aims to help to achieve.

It wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the game data itself is often times only a fraction of the actual disc size - for instance, the Super Mario 25th Anniversary Wii disc itself is a 4.7GB, when really the actual game data is only a single SNES ROM (12 MB of useful data, to be precise) and nothing else. However, with disc sizes ranging from 700 MB (CD), 1.4 GB (GC Mini-DVD), 4.7 GB (single-layered DVD), and 25 GB (Blu-Ray), they can get pretty taxing for storage, especially when newer generations of consoles games are getting bigger in file sizes. Disc images (commonly known as ISOs, but ISO is actually a specific format) are faithful software recreations of game discs (when made correctly).

Pcsx2 says iso file not found