Game Image ZIP File support

[CypherXG]

Feature Request

Is it possible to add a ZIP File support. The ISO Images are extreme big and need a lot of HD Space.
The most Emulators i know support the ZIP File format.
With Zip it is possible to compress the most ISO Images to 50-60% of the orginal size.
It would be a nice feature for the future :-)

Alternatives

No response

Additional Context

No response

[wilkovatch]

The topic of image compression has already been discussed extensively in #238.

By the way, one way to achieve the same thing without having to deal with QEMU's block drivers (thus without any changes to xemu itself) would be using a local server acting as a wrapper between the filesystem and xemu, loading the image in xemu via an URL (supported since #2050 was merged), you can find an implementation here. (Note that on Windows there is an upstream QEMU regression (#2255) that prevents it from working, but there is a fix proposal for it (#2256))

EDIT: for ZIP files in particular there is an issue not covered in the aforementioned discussion: the ZIP format is not seekable, so zipped images cannot be loaded like normal images without some custom implementation with an index generated beforehand (which is basically what PCSX2 does for gzipped files), if the ZIP instead contains the content of the image then a naive implementation could somewhat work, but would incur in more or less severe stuttering depending on the case (which is indeed what happens with the wrapper linked above when loading such ZIP files), so it would still not be a really viable option.