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#gameboyadvance

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@wyatt @kawa Until archive format overhead becomes the limiting factor for size.

At one point in early 2002, I briefly considered using the UNIX tape archive (tar) format to bundle assets in a Game Boy Advance game. Many of these assets were 2048 bytes or smaller. I looked up the spec for a POSIX tar file, and it involved rounding up each file's size to a multiple of the 512-byte block size and adding a 512-byte block header. That kind of overhead adds up. On top of that, searching for a particular file in a tarball takes linear time, not constant or even logarithmic time.

That led me to devise and document a simpler, more fit for purpose archive format called GBFS. Other specialized archive formats may benefit from packing files so as to avoid crossing 16K, 32K, 64K, or 128K block boundaries in the medium.