Originally posted by LoudMusic
Many points, well taken. I was unaware that the PS2 didn't have compression/decompression capabilities in built into the hardware. So yes, uncompressed data would make a lot of sense. A friend of mine and I were talking about things like compression hardware and encryption hardware. If computers had a chip on the motherboard, or possibly a PCI card, that did nothing but compress/decompress and encode/decode data, we would see an enormous increase in the appearance of processor speed. Video cards that decode DVD (hardware decompression) make movies play so much smoother on computers, and you can still click around in the OS without making the movie skip. The same goes for playing mp3s. Before I had an Mp3 equipped sound card, my processor ran about 25% usage while I was playing mp3s. Now the processor just sends the task to the card, and the CPU usuage drops back to 0%. So the choice is between bigger storage devices for uncompressed data, or more little cards and chips to process the compressed data.
So, you are correct. I feel informed (: But with the GameCube's compression/decompression capabilities, couldn't games could fit into smaller amounts of storage?
~LoudMusic