> with a custom data packing method that is optimized for streaming directly from CD to the hard disk without any seeking
This is nice. I've always wondered why they don't do this with the core parts of the os and then only extract additional components and drivers. But maybe back then the core was only a few MB and it wouldn't have helped so much...
I remember the setup taking ages. With 9x I don't think any install ever lasted longer than a year, so I did this a lot. :)
This is definitely an interesting part of it. Copying a few hundred megs from CD to HDD doesn't take long even for old hardware, but when I was setting up a win98 rig last autumn to test some 3dfx cards it took the common ~45 minutes to get through the main install, and that's before you get into the post-install cycle of installing any software/drivers/updates that need reboots. The "unofficial service pack3" is one I'd love to integrate as it includes support for USB mass storage which made the machine a lot easier to work with
On a side-note, walking the line between annoying and entertaining was the noise of the HD during install, which sounded like techno music and I should have recorded it. Weirdly it was only during the win98 install that it made that type of sound.
This was definitely a thing in the optical disc era of games where seek times were horrendous. In record mode, this is done by just overloading the file read functions, recording a list of file, seek position, and read size instructions, and then using that to build a .dat file. In play mode, the function is overloaded to ignore file opens and seeks, and to just read from the contiguous file. This requires the load to be perfectly deterministic, and preferably without redundancy.
This is nice. I've always wondered why they don't do this with the core parts of the os and then only extract additional components and drivers. But maybe back then the core was only a few MB and it wouldn't have helped so much...
I remember the setup taking ages. With 9x I don't think any install ever lasted longer than a year, so I did this a lot. :)