Ultimate ROM File Compression Guide (CHD, PBP, and RVZ)

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from retro gamecore now one of the major questions that I always get on this channel has to do with different file types and multi-disc games and I've done a couple videos about it in the past but me personally I've also learned a lot along the way and so in this video I'm going to show you how I personally compress and organize all of my files and specifically here we're talking about disk based games so we're going to focus mostly on PS1 PS2 and GameCube but this process can also be used with other systems that have cd based games things like Sega CD Sega Saturn Dreamcast and so on and my big takeaway here is that I hate dealing with games that have multiple files for the same game therefore that's going to be one of the issues we solve here in this video now there are lots of other ways to organize your ROM collection but for me this is what I found works best and so without any further delay let's jump into it [Music] foreign we're going to start with PlayStation one the first file type we're going to work with are called CHD files and we'll also do PVP files which will work with multiple disk games now CHD is one of my favorite file types to use with emulation not only will it compress your files to make them smaller but it works on a wide variety of games and emulators and so if you have any of the systems that are listed here and the file type is an IMG ISO GDI or binq file this is all going to work right here now understandably there are a lot of people who are kind of intimidated by converting their file Library over to CHD and that's because using the typical CHD program requires you to type in a command line interface and so people who are not comfortable with writing in command prompt or a terminal window may not like it however I recently found there is a CHD program that uses a graphical interface on Windows and it works really well and so that's what we're going to do here today and the program is called NAMM DHC or CHD man backwards and I'll have an entire written guide in the video description below that'll have links to each of the programs as well either way what you want to do here is go to the releases page and then download the most recent release here we're going to want to grab two files the chdman exe file as well as The NAMM DHC file and you can save these wherever you want as long as you have easy access to them now I've saved them directly in the same folder that we're going to be working in with all of our different game files and for this we're going to start with PlayStation 1. as you can see within my PSX folder I have three different games here that are using different types of Bin and queue files for example with Symphony in the night we have two bin files and one queue file the bin files actually hold the data and the queue file just basically tells the emulator where to look a lot of PS1 games will only come with a single bin or queue file and so I have that represented here with crash team racing however there are other PS1 games that have multiple bin files like this one here PlayStation pix is a demo disc that came with the original PS1 and I still love playing it to this day now if you were to throw these files into your SD card for whatever system you're using for example the Miu mini or the Odin or anything else like that what will probably happen is you'll see all these files at once and it can be kind of a pain to navigate through and figure out which file you're supposed to actually load and so by converting these to CHD files we'll only have one file per game making it much easier to navigate through your folder and as a side benefit it'll also compress these files so you have more storage space as well so going back to that main folder we're going to open up The NAMM DHC file right here and the interface is mostly self-explanatory but I'll walk you through it anyway we're going to click on add files then go into our PSX folder here and then you can see it's picked up on all the different queue files it would be the same if you're using a GDI or ISO file or even if you had your game still zipped so once we've selected all of our games we then want to select an output folder so wherever we want these CHD files to be saved I'm going to put them right back in that PSX folder from there all you have to do is click on that create CHD button right here it'll take a couple minutes to run through this program it'll depend on how many games you're running as well but once it's done it'll let you know in addition you'll have the opt to see a report we're going to click yeah man I want to do it within here you can see how long it took overall a little bit over one minute and it'll also confirmed that each of those games were successfully created and so now let's go into that PSX folder and now we have those CHD files embedded with the other ones so I'm going to sort it here by different file type and yeah here are those three right here and so let me select everything but the CHD file so you can get an idea here of how big it is as you can see it is 1.68 gigs for these three games now if we grab all three of those CHD files you can see it's under one gigabyte and so overall we had a 42 reduction in file size by going CHD not only that we only have single files for each of these games so we can delete all these others and we have these entire games right here and so that's why I like CHD files so much not only will it simplify your entire ROM library but it compresses them a bunch as well and you're not losing any quality in this way either and as I mentioned earlier the CHD process works on a number of different systems including all of these that you see right here and so if you have a ROM library and it's full of different types of files then my recommendation here is to use this app to simplify the entire process it might take you like an entire evening to do this but it's a great time to open up Netflix open up a bottle of wine and just have at it and when it comes down to it most of the emulators that are available right now will work with CHD files every once in a while if there's a very old emulator it may not work but nowadays everything does including retroarc and so as you can see here I'm booting right into crash team racing as well as Castlevania Symphony of the Night okay so that's what I recommend doing for all these CD based systems but one system in particular had a lot of multi-disc games and that again is going to be PlayStation one for example I have a different folder called PSX multi-disc and within here I have Final Fantasy VII and if you remember that was a three disc game and so as you can see it has three different bin and Q files now there's a couple different ways we could do this number one we could create three different CHD files one for each disk and then you can use something called an m3u file which is basically a playlist file that'll allow you to pick whichever disk you want however as you you can imagine that means you're going to have one file for every one of those disks and then also that m3u file now there are some tricks to this like you could hide these CHD files but it takes a little bit extra work instead my recommendation is actually to use a different file type called PBP and this essentially is a file type that was used for PlayStation 1 games to work on the original PSP and so we're going to use this old program here called PSX to PSP and this program has been around forever in fact I think there are cave paintings about it it's that old anyway all you want to do here is download this file and then you want to unzip it either using 7-Zip or WinRAR and then put it somewhere that's easy to access I'm just going to put it here on my desktop from there you want to open up the PSX to PSP executable file it's going to give you an option here to choose between theme mode and classic mode and so even though the theme mode is a little bit prettier I've always found that classic mode or classic Mode as they spelled it here actually works best so we're going to go that route after you select it it's going to open up this window right here and what you want to do here is grab each of those disks for your game and as you can see you you can use up to five discs in one single file so to start we're going to grab disk one from Final Fantasy VII then we'll go down to the second disk here and then same thing here we're going to point it to the second disk of the game next as you can imagine we're going to do the same thing for the third disk so we'll pick that third file then the third file itself and then we need to pick an output folder and for this I'm going to use that same PSX multi-disc folder from there you can ignore everything else and then just press this convert button here now I gotta say this app is very old and so sometimes it'll just break on you like it won't work and you'll have to retry it again and so if you do get an error here then I would recommend just trying it again and there's also going to be times when it finishes the conversion process but it won't tell you in the menu and so it's just a little bit buggy by virtue of being a very old program either way with any luck when it is done it'll say done and it'll tell you how much it can press it as well so you can see here it compressed it by 26 percent now if we go back into that PSX multi-disc folder you can see right here it has the serial number of Final Fantasy VII and if we go inside there you can see there's a file called eboot.pbp and again this is a remnant of having to put it on the PSP back in the day so all you want to do here is just change the file name to something that's more familiar like Final Fantasy VII and after that we're done we have the entire game and one single file and it's been compressed by 26 percent and so as before we're going to use retroarch to open up this game and when it starts you can see here on the bottom right it says setting disk and tray one out of three that means it's loading the first disc in the series now say you're at a point where you want to get to a different disk like it's saying to switch disks or you want to start on a different disk what you want to do is go into the retroart quick menu and then within here go down to the disk control option here what you want to do is eject the current disk and then under current disk index you want to switch it to whatever disk you actually want to load after that select insert disk and it's basically the same thing as if you physically put the disk inside and so for example we're using disk 2 of Final Fantasy VII but trying to start a new game which isn't going to work and as you can see right here it's asking us to insert disk one and so same thing here we can go back and insert disk one again we're going to go back to the quick menu eject the disk change it to disk index 1 and then insert the disk again and just like that the game starts right up and so that is how you convert your multi-disc games into a single file and then also how you change your disks within the game okay next let's move over to PlayStation 2. there are two major types of compressed files that you usually will find we have the CHD files which are just like what we did with PS1 but then also we have gz files which are made by 7-Zip and so let me show you that process here I have three different PS2 games right here they are all in ISO format and all you really need to do here is have 7-Zip installed on your computer you can right click on the file here and then select 7-Zip add to Archive and then under archive format you want to change this from whatever it is to gzip now you can try different compression levels but I personally use maximum it just seems to be a good middle ground and also I like to remove the ISO from the file name so it's just going to say the name of the game plus gz anyway that's it you can go ahead and press OK and then it'll start converting this from the iso format to compress it into gz now I like this process because you don't have to install anything additional you can just right click on it you set 7-Zip and you're good however the problem here is that it'll take up a lot of system resources to work so it'll bog your computer down quite a bit and it's kind of a slow process for example here using Final Fantasy 10 and just that one single game took about six and a half minutes not only that you can only do this one game at a time and so if you have multiple PS2 games this could take quite a while and so my solution here is to use that same CHD process we did with PS1 with PS2 and luckily the major emulators for PS2 including pcsx2 and Aether sx2 will use these CHD files anyway the process is the same here we're just going to go and select our three ISO files and then we'll also put them in the same output folder of PS2 after that we'll choose create CHD and We're Off to the Races the nice thing here is that if we look at the report it took a little bit under seven minutes to do all three games and so effectively this is three times as fast as doing it with gz files and you don't have to do them one at a time you can do them all at once now depending on the bulk of the game itself you may not get a big reduction in file size for example here we only got 17 average between these three games however if you have other PS2 games they're a little bit more lightweight often they can be reduced by a lot more either way we've at least reduced it by 17 percent and so that's pretty great too and so here I am in pcsx2 starting up a game and yes Final Fantasy 10 Jack and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank all loaded up perfectly the other Advantage about CHD files over gz files is that gz files take a lot longer to load than CHD files not only that within pcsx2 they'll make like a temp file which can take up additional space with CHD files you don't have to worry about any of that the games are going to load very quickly and there's not going to be any Remnant temporary files and so this is one of the many reasons why I prefer to use CHD over the gz files okay next up we're going to do Nintendo GameCube this one uses a specific compressed file and I really like this one too and it's easy to set up in fact all you need to have is a more recent version of the Dolphin Emulator which you'll probably already have on your computer if you're going to be playing Nintendo games anyway and so here in my GameCube folder you can see I have three games F0 Luigi's Mansion and Mario Kart and I've already used dolphin to point to these three games within the emulator and converting these files is super easy all you have to do is right click on the game and then select convert file now you can convert to multiple different ones but I prefer the rvz it's the most advanced compressor that they have right now and I'll typically use the standard compression level of five after that select convert It'll ask you where to save the game and I'm just going to save it in the same folder and then it'll convert the game depending on the game it can take anywhere from like 10 seconds to up to a minute either way for this one you do have to do it one at a time but it is pretty fast and so I'm going to speed through the other two games right here but now let's look at the final result for some of the chunkier games like F0 GX as you can see here we only got 11 file size reduction but for other games you have a huge difference for example with Luigi's Mansion we got an 89 file size reduction and same thing with Mario Kart Double Dash we got 80 percent down and so this is a great way to compress your files very easily without having to use additional software other than the Dolphin Emulator itself now if your version of dolphin doesn't have that option to convert the file you're probably working with a very old version of the emulator and so you just want to update it but that's it let's go ahead and start up our games and yeah as you can see right here our GameCube games are working great too now I've been messing with the settings in Dolphins so for example I have the boot logo right here let me know if you want a guide on how to do this it's super simple to set up and then I'm also using a widescreen hack and then upscale to 1080p as well but long story short yes GameCube games can be compressed it's very easy to do and they work great and really that's about it right here I know this video was a little bit longer in terms of guides but I wanted to show you how the whole process worked from start to finish my hope here is that instead of having to pick and choose between a bunch of different short videos to figure out how to get certain systems working this one's going to work for the majority of the issues that you have and as I mentioned before I have a written guide Linked In the video description that'll talk you through this entire process as well either way I hope you found this video helpful this would have been really helpful for me when I was first starting out and and so I wanted to share this knowledge with you so let me know what you think in the comments below do you prefer this system as well or do you do something else to compress your files like I mentioned in the beginning there are many ways to skin this cat but this is the one I prefer as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 83,921

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Id: PZXEJA81vGM

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023