Dingoonity.org

There is somebody on the internet who managed to rip psx games to extremely small bin files. For example: Quake II to a bin of 64 MB (instead of ~200 MB) and Loony Toons Racing to 120 MB instead of 433 MB. And they work too!

How does he do that? Is sound not included? Are cutscenes deleted?  

[correction: Quake II does not work...]

Edit 2-11-2009:
A few tricks can be tried, although they do not always work.

1. The method that Quadomatic suggested to me: http://pocketmatrix.com/guides/psxrip. There they suggest replacing XA (audio) and STR (video) files with blank ones one can download from that website.

2. Trying to compress the CD images w/ CDGenPS2. Extract the bin/cue w/ kiso (linux) or winiso (windows) first to an iso file and then extract that iso file to harddisk w/ Rar. After that: use cdgenps2. One may try to replace dummy files and/or video/audio files with blank one's. I use a text file with the word "dummy" in it and rename it to the file I want to replace (a zero-byte file don't work). Will that get you into trouble when you stumble upon a point in the game at which the movie/audio needs to be loaded? Probably!

3. Download those very small image files from a certain forum which I cannot mention literally here because that would be illegal.

Method 1 does not work for me w/ psx4all. But methods 2 and 3 sometimes do. Afterwards one can compress the games even more w/ cbin.linux or cbin.mac (utility included in the psx4all zip file I believe ...). Here are the games I succeeded in compressing to an acceptable size:

• Ace Combat 2: to 59 MB w/ method 2. I replaced ACE2.STP with a dummy file. Then used cdgenps2 and cbin.
• Forsaken (16.5 MB!): method 3. Used cbin to compress even more.
• Loony Toons Racing (65 MB). Method 3 and cbin.
• MDK (66 MB). CDgenps2 and cbin
• Wipeout 3 (43 MB). Replaced the CD audio files (the wav's) with dummies.
• Side by Side. Method 3.

Have you had any success?

It's possible to remove cutscenes and dummy files from psx rips. You can find instructions on how to do stuff like that on pocketmatrix.com

there is a legend that a 800 MB dreamcast image can reach 50-100mb when compressed... guess anything is possible

It's possible to remove cutscenes and dummy files from psx rips. You can find instructions on how to do stuff like that on pocketmatrix.com

Yep! that's it. Quote:

Almost every *.STR file in a game is a movie

See: http://pocketmatrix.com/guides/psxrip . The tutorial is for Windows. I may boot some more often into Windows the following days (I use Linux per default) to get all my favourite PSX images to fit on one of those cheap 2 GB SD cards! Thank you very much for the link.

There are also many good psx rips at a site that starts with snes and ends with rama.   

Yep! But a lot of them don't work. So I may try to get the larger images that work to a smaller size myself. 

Looks like good success! Will try to shrink some images at the weekend!

Hm. What to do with .mov files?

I wish I knew. The are not Quicktime movies, but considering the file size of those files I am convinced that they are movies. Therefore they are expendable. One might replace them w/ blank movies in the same format, but then again, that very often does not work w/ the str movies. Maybe some games check file size as some sort of copy protection, I don't know. Maybe the blank str movies I use are corrupt... I dunno.