Dreamcast games varied in size massively. Crazy Taxi was only around 100mb. So small in fact that when initially burnt to a CD the drive couldn't load files fast enough (as files were closer to the inner ring of the disc). Tools were then released to 'pad' the game files out to be closer to the outer edge with a dummy file. Files close to the outer edge can be read faster as the drive laser can cover more distance per revolution.
Skies of Arcadia was I believe the biggest ever 'released' - 2x1GB. A group called Echelon did manage to release it after many months/1 year+(?) without anything ripped, sized to fit on 2x700mb CD-R's. They pre-compressed the whole game and wrote a custom on-the-fly decompresser. Apparently this did slow the game down in places, but the technical achievement certainly needs to be appreciated.
Oh yes, I remember padding the image, and Echelon, of course. I still have the tools somewhere in my backups.
You mention the read speed issues, meaning the dreamcast drive was CAV. Were all data drives of the time CAV? Are audio CD players CAV? Not some 40 second skip protection discman, but like a hifi unit from the 80s (since my naive 80s implementation would not like the data rate changing across the disc)? Does CAV vs CLV have any meaning here, or is pretty much laserdisc only terms?
All things I vaguely feel like I should know (like if all optical media has pits that are the same length across the disc. I think not, again laserdisc.) I love my dreamcast. Left one in an apartment 6 years ago when I moved out. It could be still there. Still have one.
CDs are CLV, data-wise. But many CD-ROM drives can also read at faster-than-realtime-audio speeds, and in those cases reading at the outer edge of the disc can net faster rates. IE, a 2x CD-ROM might not be 2x throughout the whole disc.
If you search google for their Skies of Arcadia nfo file, you will see this is clearly what they claim. I won't link to it here due to other material hosted on those sites. The trainer injected into the executable also makes this claim (you can view this on pouet.net).
I have little reason to doubt their claims given their clear technical skill spanning multiple console generations (Echelon might have only been associated with the Dreamcast/PS2, but it's obvious that their 'group' were behind multiple other, very highly technically accomplished scene groups).
Access to the source code is even a possibility - at one point they routinely released games weeks or even months before street dates.
Wonderful. I love things like this. In these days of Steam DB and people scrutinising every byte, it seems like the easter egg / message from the developer has gone by the wayside.
Honestly, inserting compression doesn't sound impossible. Difficult, but a few months and a team of people and it sounds achievable. Warez folks do some crazy stuff.
However, I read some forums from the time, it sounds like the results weren't great. Mainly folks notice sound triggering noticably late. So uh, Maybe instead of downsampling they built a MP3 decoder, but to use the existing system, it couldn't stream the audio, so they had to decompress the clip completely into a buffer before playback?
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. In my head I was thinking in terms of games that weren't ripped/downsampled to 'fit' on an 80min CD-R. I think the largest release was probably D2, which from memory needed 5x99min CDR's and even then numerous elements were downsampled/ripped/etc.
Skies of Arcadia was I believe the biggest ever 'released' - 2x1GB. A group called Echelon did manage to release it after many months/1 year+(?) without anything ripped, sized to fit on 2x700mb CD-R's. They pre-compressed the whole game and wrote a custom on-the-fly decompresser. Apparently this did slow the game down in places, but the technical achievement certainly needs to be appreciated.