HowTo Utilize RAMDisk

How to use a RAMDisk with RocketLauncher

Using a RAMDisk uses your physical RAM as a "virtual drive" while not only saving wear and tear on your HDDs, it can speed up loading on many disk based games. It will also help improve the performance of demanding emulators due to the speed of RAM as opposed to regular mechanical HDDs as well as save you wear and tear on your SSDs.

Requirements

1. As much ram as you want the size of your RAMDisk to be. Consider the size of your biggest games you want to run to determine how much you need
2. RAMDisk application

Step One

Go here and download RAMDisk. The link is at the bottom of the page. Once you have it downloaded, install it wherever you like. For my use, and the sake of this tutorial, I installed the program into it's default location as I am on a 64-bit OS.: C:\Program Files\SoftPerfect RAM Disk

Step Two

Once you have the program installed, run it. You will be presented with a window that has a large green plus sign, a red X, etc. What you will want to do here is click on the green plus sign. This will bring up another window that will let you Add/Edit a "virtual disk", similar to Daemon's Tools.

Step Three

I have 8GB of DDR3 running dual channel in my system, so the majority of the time, I have at least 4GB free, but considering most retro disc based systems ISO sizes are under 2GB, GCN and Dreamcast usually run between 1 - 1.4 GB filesize uncompressed, I made my RAMDisk 2GB just so I would have some breathing room so to speak. I set my drive letter to "L:" and also set it to "Mount as Removable Drive". You could use Hard Disk Emulation, but from my experience, using it as a Removable Drive works just as well. Next, set your File System Options, assuming most folks are on Windows 7+, set the filesystem to NTFS, and create a folder, you can name this folder whatever you want, I named mine "TEMP FOR DISC BASED GAMES" just for sake of clarity and ease of use. Click Okay and your new RAMDisk is setup and ready to go! You should see the RAMdrive as a Device with Removable Storage under your HDDs, if you followed my suggestions.

Step Four

This is by far the easiest step. Start up RocketLauncherUI and again, for sake of making this as easy as possible, go under GLOBAL in the Select a System column, then click on the Settings tab. Under Settings, go the 7z section. Set your Extract Path to the folder you created on your RAMDisk, and you're done, as long as you have all of your disc based systems decompressing to the same folder, if not, just set them to use_global and they will use this folder. Now you're done!
As you can see, it is very easy to set up, and should give you considerable speed up when it comes to your games. I for example love the game GUN for GCN. The game was unplayable for me before, running around 47 fps and jumping around really bad. Once I decompressed the ISO onto my RAMDisk and ran it from there, I got a HUGE performance boost. I gained between 5~6 fps and the game is completely playable for me now. I also noticed major speed increases for other systems, such as Dreamcast under Demul 0.7, and the games decompress faster as well. My decompression times have been cut almost in half. So if you have at least 8GB of system RAM, I would highly recommend using a RAMDisk, it will save your SSDs and will get you gaming faster, with better performance all around.