[pronik]

Around the time DirectX came around and first games requiring it appeared, which in my memory coincided with hard drives getting way bigger and first games being delivered on a CD instead of floppies, I've been apalled at how I could see literal BMPs being written to disk during the installation. This was the same time when cracked games were being distributed via BBS at a fraction of the original size with custom installers which decompressed MP3s to their original WAV files. I've asked the same questions then: why WAV, why BMP, why the bloat? With time I've learned the answer: disk space is cheap, memory and CPU cycles are not, if you can afford to save yourself the decoding step, you just do it, your players will love it. You work with constraints you have and when there loosen up, your possibilities expand too.

[Anamon]

However, in the early days of the CD-ROM games, the trade-off wasn't simple. It was cheap for manufacturers to fill the entire 650 MB of the disc, but for the players, HDD storage by GB wasn't. And just keeping the stuff on the disc was often no option either because of seek times. You usually don't want to wait the half second it takes for the drive to move the laser to where the next sound effect is stored.

I also fondly remember those scene re-packs! Some of them had such clever and extreme compression that it took several hours to re-inflate the game. Remember Uharc? =)