This Android emulation compression tool can free up a ton of space

Whether you’re using your phone itself, pairing it with a controller grip, or even picked up a full-on dedicated handheld console, Android is powering some of the best mobile game emulation experiences out there. Today’s emulators can handle some of the best retro titles to ever launch, and while it’s a lot of fun to have access to mountains of PlayStation or Saturn games right in your pocket, all those disc images can start eating up your storage, fast. Thankfully, there’s a new tool leaving beta that’s ready to help do something about that.

When games expanded from ROMs to optical storage, file sizes went though the roof, and while you may not bat an eye at a single CD ISO image taking up 700MB, that quickly becomes a different story when you want a library of dozens of games at your disposal. Luckily, the emulation community has an ace up its sleeve: the CHD file format. And this week marks the arrival of CHDroid v1.1.0.

CHD files got started back with arcade emulators, when they were used to compress hard drive rips from arcade titles. Remember the classic lightgun shooter Area 51? That’s basically an Atari Jaguar with a hard drive storing all the video footage, and anyone emulating it would need a CHD copy of game data.

As it turns out, though, CHDs don’t have to be hard drive images, and the format’s just as compatible with optical discs. By converting an ISO into a CHD, you’re able to compress the game data to take up less space. And the best part is that since many emulators support CHD files natively, you don’t need to decompress them before playing — it’s all seamless.

Wondering what the catch is? Well, so far the best way to convert disc images to CHDs was to use a tool on a PC. And while that works, it’s a bit less than elegant if you’re cultivating a mobile-first game library. This is exactly why we’re so excited for CHDroid leaving beta and having its v1.1.0 release.

CHDroid is an Android CHD conversion tool, letting you turn your big game disc images into slightly smaller CHD files. You can even restore them back to their original form, but with emulators able to play CHDs directly, there’s little reason to do so.

If you’re interested in seeing what it can do to reduce the storage toll your game library is placing on your Android phone, you can grab CHDroid from the Play Store and get started shrinking down those files right now.