When possible i enjoy copying a game to a ramdrive and running it there. This affords the fastest load times for the game. However not every game can be made to do this. Quite a few games have save folders within the game which requires either you to manually copy the saves back again, or not do it at all. More modern games tend to save the game somewhere else, either the AppFolder, or your Documents.

1) Eligibility.

Size
The size has to be small enough. Having 16Gigs this means any 4Gig or smaller game has no issues running on my computer. For those with 4Gigs or lower, your games will likely be a Gig or less.

Ramdrive Limitations
Some ramdrive software is bound to be better than others. I have a preference for imdisk since it's free, open source, installs without issues, and well does really well. Although going for more than 4Gigs has cause my computer to crash. Why? I don't know.

To note i also recommend using 7zip

Logs / Saves
If a game actively makes logs while it's running, you can't make it as an iso file for mounting, and have to rely on probably either a zip extraction method, or xcopy or making the drive and saving it as an image to load later. (which could cause wasted space)

Saves in the game's directory is a good way to lose progress. Games like Aquaria, Sacred 1, Recettear, Transistor, and any DOS Game. Although you can still append a saving script to save your savegames, it's potentially more trouble than it's worth.

Try running the game from a ramdrive to see how it behaves. If it won't run in a new location, it's probably not going to work for you.

2) Preparation
Assuming you're satisfied with a game as running from a ramdrive (and i'll assume no local saves), then it's a matter of prepping it. After the game's installed you can delete the uninstall data and webcache.zip file(s); Restoring them after you master your iso/zip is suggested.

Optimizing files (optional): Some games heavily use png files or zips as their archives (Torchlight and Spaz for example). Recompacting these files will make it smaller, but isn't required. In some cases resizing videos can be quite helpful. (Divinity Dragon Commander for example)

Deleting unneeded files: Sometimes a game will have files you just don't need. If you only ever play a game at high quality, you don't need the low quality versions. If you only speak english, it's probably save to delete non-english related files. Also remove the shortcut as that points to the original install location NOT to the ramdrive.

Adding mods: Some games you want extra mods or other addons. Spaz for example i've added the fight for beef, and rebalancing versions. Once they've compiled and been added they will become a permanent addition to the game. Same with ToME. Just make sure the mods all work together that you want :)

3) Mastering
Although i'd say making an ISO is preferred since it's read-only and represents a specific version/copy of the game, of which you might have multiple of if some things don't work between versions.

However for the standard user, i'll just say make it a zip. In windows, right-click->Send to->Compressed (zipped) Folder.

Make a directory on your desktop, something like Ramdrive Games.

If you normally have a ramdrive running that's large enough for the game, having a batch file extract it will work fine. If however you don't, the creation of the ramdrive will have to be part of the batch file. I enjoy ISO's a little more since you can say to load the ISO and the ramdrive will be created to EXACTLY fit the iso. Plus there won't be a huge copy problem if the space can't be allocated.

ISO: code (For Victor Vran) (unaltered)
[code]
imdisk -a -f "c:\GoG Games\Victor Vran.iso" -m e: -o ro,cd -t vm
explorer "e:\Victor Vran\"
echo Press any key to unmount this game
pause
imdisk -D -m e:
[/code]

ZIP code (For ToME) (tested)
[code]
imdisk -a -s 512M -p "/fs:fat /q /y /v:Ramdisk" -o rem -m z:
rem if the ramdisk failed to load, proceeding may cause unintended results. Simply close the window
pause
z:
cd\
7z x "c:\GoG Games\Tome_131.zip"
explorer "Tales of Maj'Eyal"
pause
imdisk -D -m z:
[/code]

ZIP code (For ToME) (unaltered) - for a preallocated always running ramdrive on D:
[code]
d:
cd\
7z x "c:\GoG Games\Tome_131.zip"
explorer "Tales of Maj'Eyal"
pause
rm -fr "Tales of Maj'Eyal"
[/code]

4) Modifying the batch file

Using the imdisk tool, adjust the filename to the exact iso or zip file you are referring to. -m z: refers to the drive letter you want to create. Adjust that depending on what drive letters are used or you can use. In my youth we used to set Z: as the CD drive.

The 512M is the size of the ramdrive. If you need larger, increase it up to 2048, although if you go larger you might need to change fat to fat32 or ntfs.

The explorer change to the directory of the game folder that is extracted/made, which will let you simply run the game. I suggest this since if you run the game directly, if you decide to close it (say, changing a setting) you totally unload the game rather than waiting for confirmation from the pause. If you drop the dismount command (last line) then you can have it run the game directly. However if you run the game directly the drive may not show up in your browser properly as it may not have been able to register itself with the OS properly.

Other options:
Rather than loading the entire game if you have more limited ram, you could just mount the iso. Then dummy copy the iso to null which caches it. During emulation i have done this to see performance increases. If you have the dd tool, or know your copy supports /dev/nul then you can incorporate that instead.

5) Finally the game
Once the game extracts/copies/loads properly into the ramdrive, simply run it. When you're done, the pause used for the batch file prevents it from unloading. Closing the window will prevent the unload in case you plan on playing the game on and off. Pressing a button to continue will unload the ramdrive.

On a modern OS, this should not be necessary.

At least on Linux, any files accessed will be cached in RAM; then, when the file is read again, it will be read straight from RAM, without hitting the disk. (This *should* be the case on modern versions of Windows and Mac OS.)

Hence, if the same content is loaded multiple times, it should load as fast as it would from a ram drive the second (and later) time around, unless so much RAM is in use that the cached file needs to be evicted from RAM.

and 12 gig users ?

It's possible more data is cached than needed. However the other solution to pre-caching the data is to xcopy all your data to null. If there's hundreds or thousands of files, this can be far longer than a single file being loaded. Plus caching isn't guaranteed if you rely on the OS.

Regardless I've noticed a speedup with games that take a long time to load. Why? Not sure, perhaps there's logs it's writing. Maybe it's doing it's own internal caching.

To be honest I've seen HUGE problems with delays moreso with emulation where caching the entire ISO removes that issue. Maybe a video sequence will play better the second time around, but sometimes having a 1/2 second inturruption while the game decides it needs to load something is quite annoying for me. Not only that it will do all the loading (Except a few DLL's from the system maybe, and the saves) and otherwise let the harddrive calm down and go quiet, rather than doing a bunch of seeks still. Even if systems are far better, fragmentation still happens, and sometimes the IO is just very busy, especially if you have background stuff going on. Depends on how big of a drive you can make and how much resources the game uses. Not much else to say. To note I also have VM turned off.