some kind of compressed images support

[foxyshadis]

I love what you're doing with compressed images, it warms my heart. <3 Will the mds compression be able to handle the elimination of difficult-to-compress checksum data, similar to the ECM tool? Unfortunately, isz doesn't work for me when most of my files have at least some sectors without checksums. And I know this is a long shot, but will it support any form of dedicated audio compression, either more intelligent lossless like flac or even mp3? (Doubtful, I guess, and I'll probably still have to manually deconstruct audio/video in archived game backups, and reconvert when I want to play again.)

[kapoue3]

Dear DT team,
It seems that some people need compressed ISO, I've asked to write a plugin but 'you' said that only companies/firms can write this.
I've a good experience in a specific Compressed format, that can be used by the Playstation Portable, called CSO
You can have a look on http://cisoplus.ifrance.com
I can easily simulate functions such as fopen, fread, fseek, ftell, etc.
The software still convert ISO->CSO CSO->ISO and even CSO->CSO (with different parameters of compression)
I don't really understand why it cannot be possible to have documentation or only some help to write simply a plugin like nrgmount.dll, bw5mount.dll, ....
Perhaps the code to read ISO is inside the main program?
Can you just give me some information to understand how is hard to develop such a plugin
Thank you
Best regards

[DevX]

It is not possible to make plugin like bw5mount which simply
"simulates" fopen, fread etc for virtual drive because it works in kernel: you need make some driver. Current plugin architecture can work only with uncompressed images or only with some compressed formats which are supported directly in kernel by virtual drive itself: these are currently only ZLIB and BZIP2.

[kapoue3]

Current plugin architecture can work only with uncompressed images or only with some compressed formats which are supported directly in kernel by virtual drive itself: these are currently only ZLIB and BZIP2.

The CSO format uses (and I used) the zlib. There are only inflateInit2 inflate and inflateEnd. The CSO format is very very simple to understand and implement. It's clear that it will produce larger files than other compression schema but I think it will be very interesting to have a look on it.

Thank you for your explications

[DevX]

In such case making plugin for it should be straightforward -
for any further info please mail locutus@daemon-tools.cc

[merlin]

Suggestion for additional file types

I love Daemon Tools and would put it above all other virtual cd applications. However I think you guys should look at the possibility of supporting file types that are not traditionally used as cd image files (e.g. .zip, .rar, vhd, etc.)
There's an application called WinMount that is moving in this direction. It's no where near as nice as Daemon Tools but I think the developer has some interesting ideas. Take a look.

http://www.winmount.com/

[kapoue3]

In such case making plugin for it should be straightforward -
for any further info please mail locutus@daemon-tools.cc

It's done, I'm waiting your reply

[TheBigGuy]

A good compressed CD Image format is .CISO which you can use Pismo File Mount to create and convert your ISOs to CISO. It uses LZMA compression and is better than .UIF, .DAA and .ISZ in terms of compression.

It is completely free and open source and I hope to see it integrated into Daemon Tools!

Pismo File Mount

-Neil

[dave4mame]

hi, are there any plans to add mp3 support?
i mean audio track stored as mp3
bin+mp3 is a format largely used to store old console games (saturn, psx, sega cd)... emulation community would be grateful forever!

[cocomonk22]

A good compressed CD Image format is .CISO which you can use Pismo File Mount to create and convert your ISOs to CISO. It uses LZMA compression and is better than .UIF, .DAA and .ISZ in terms of compression.

It is completely free and open source and I hope to see it integrated into Daemon Tools!

Pismo File Mount

-Neil

I disagree. DAA is better compression if you compare DAA with best compression settings with CISO using LZMA settings. However, CISO using LZMA is the second-best compression for CD images, beating ISZ, UIF, and MDS/MDF, and due to it being free, it would be easier to implement into Daemon Tools.

[Cleveland Rock]

Any word on 7-Zip support? This is a much needed feature!

[JoSch]

My suggestion is:

• Support transparent compression for all image formats
• Support two compression.formats:
• 1. gzip, because it is wide used and very fast with still good compression ratio.
• 2. xz (the official format for LZMA2 on Linux, this means same compression as 7-zip) because it provides very good compression

The containers and compression methods are very well documented, and there is widely used public-domain code available.

Resources:
For gzip:
Description: RFC1952
Library: zlib

For xz:
Description: XZ file format
Library: LZMA SDK and XZ Utils

The image would then be stored as e.g. image.iso.gz or image.iso.xz
The same for other image formats.
So you would have to implement this as filter, which processes the file stream and then forwards it to the code handling the different image formats.
If you would create a plugin-api for this, it could be extended by other developers, but I think this two formats should be enough.

[Kevin12345]

such file does not support daemon tools images