• vettnerk@lemmy.ml
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Drivespace was what enabled me to play Baldurs Gate 1 back in the day. My specs back then:

    • 32MB RAM
    • Pentium166 MMX
    • 500ish MB drive (My 2GB went bust, so I used an old spare drive for quite a while)
    • 16X CDROM
    • 2X CD Burner... yarr, that made me a lot of money
    • 3dFX Voodoo2 8MB coupled with an ATI Rage Pro
    • Soundblaster Live
  • th_in_gs@lemmy.sdf.org
    ·
    1 year ago

    The idea is still around! Apple’s APFS file system (and HFS+in its later days) support sort-of transparent compression, and on all its platforms most system files - the ones that don’t change much - are compressed to save space for user files. There’s surprisingly little documentation about this.

    There’s a third party tool you can use to compress files yourself: https://github.com/RJVB/afsctool

    It looks like the technical details are in this pdf: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
      ·
      1 year ago

      Btrfs has compression as well. It compressed my root partition to a third of it's size. It helps out with some games as well, but they usually are not as compressible. The performance impact is pretty minimal as long as you don't set the compression level excessively high.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    But look at that estimation screen! Again, rant all you wish, Microsoft knew how to handle a long running task even back in MS-DOS days. In this case, it’s estimated at 46 minutes. Great!

    Meanwhile, today it's often just "beachball!". It's become a bit of a lost art.