I'm backing up my XBOX games onto DVD's. Just trying to organize what's on my XBOX HDD andl clean some stuff up. I read somewhere that you can create a dummy bin file to eat up the remaining space on a DVD so that the load times are decreased and there is less wear and tear on the laser. For example:

My game is 1.2GB. My DVD-R holds roughly 4.3GB. I create a dummy.bin file using a dummy file generator that I found with a size of 3.1GB (4.3 - 1.2). I rename the "dummy.bin" file to "1.bin" and place it in my game folder (the one I created when I extracted the ISO usinf Craxtion). Now my game folder is 4.3GB. So when I now re-create the iso and burn, the "1.bin" file is written first (on the inside of the disc) pushing the game data to the outer edge of the disc. Now when I play the backup, since the laser reads from the outside, my game will load faster.

Does this process really help? Or have I been duped? I tried a game and it loaded pretty quickly. Thanks in advance!

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it might help a little but me personally have never recieved any super slow loading times on my xbox,so i dont think it is really needed....

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It could help,but frankly it's not really needed. I mean there are xbox games that are 300MB and I have no trouble with those even. [my Dvd drive in mine is from about 2001 and no troubles with it yet]

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Yeah I've never needed to use that either, I have several games under 700MB's and have no probs burning them to disc. Dummies are more assoicated with PS2 games.

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Last time I used a dummy file was on the bios disk for the x3 chip....and I used it alot on dreamcast games back in the day.

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That's exactly what I use it for on the PS2. My modchip has a feature where you can have a custom pic instead of the PS2 boot logo, so I use dummies to help my PS2 load the custom flash disc I build.

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Thanks for the replies. Saved me a lot of time!

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It might help someone else that might be looking for information on this to know what a dummy file is and what its purpose is for in the xbox modding scene.

Q: What is a dummy file?
A: A dummy file is just that. An empty file created to a certain size to do nothing more than take up space.

Q: Why would I want to use one with my Xbox?
A: If your creating a disk of some sort (BIOS flash cd) that contains less than 100 MB of data, you might consider using a dummy file to increase the size of the disk. This does one thing. It helps the xbox to be able to read the disk on initial insertion. It doesn't help to read faster or anything like that, it just helps with disk recognition. All xbox dvd drives do not have this problem, but if you do create a disk thats under 100 MB and your xbox doesn't recognize the disk, you might consider using a dummy file to bump the size up.

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easiest way I use is just take a divx of a TV show and while the extensions are shown,just change the extension. Done. More simple than getting an app that does it.

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yeah, you can use just about any file or even files. When in a pinch, I have zipped up several smaller files into one zip file, change the extension and you have a dummy file.

Or, you could download a dummy file creator to make things easy. Here is one.

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