Perhaps, now few people remember the time when mobile phones could hardly reproduce polyphonic MIDI melodies, and their displays could boast of only 65,000 color gradations. Modern smartphones are, in fact, portable microcomputers with a powerful central processor, cells of their own RAM, a drive, and so on. It is not surprising that the owners of such systems often have a desire to play real computer games. And one of the difficulties that you have to face is how to decompress the cache.
Feature of apps on Android
Now you will not surprise anyone with impressive volumes of computer game distributions, but in the world of software for smartphones, several tens of megabytes are considered the norm. Or even less than that. In fact, this is only partly true. A user, for example, downloading a game of 5 MB in size, may not suspect that after it is launched in the background, the main data of the application is being downloaded. This set of files is essentially the game. Heis called "cache". Although, theoretically, APK files of several gigabytes are possible, and there may be problems installing them. In order to save traffic and make it more convenient, the entire set can be pre-downloaded from any other source and transferred to your gadget. The main thing in this case is to understand how to unpack the cache on Android, or, in other words, how to correctly install the application.
Preparation
It is necessary to select a cache for your gadget. Here the type of video accelerator is important (Mali, PowerVR, Adreno), the amount of available memory, the processor and, first of all, the screen resolution. Most often, the cache is offered for download in the form of a single archive file, which is more rational than many small ones. Thus, the first thing you need to pay attention to is how to unpack the cache that is in the archive. The most popular formats are zip and rar. Initially, it is recommended to download the archive to a personal computer, unpack it there, and then transfer it to the gadget. To work with archived data, you need to install WinZip and/or WinRAR programs. As an example, consider how to unpack a cache on a computer. First of all, you need to run WinRAR; then select the downloaded archive as an analogue of the standard explorer; point to the "Extract" icon in the program header and confirm the proposed path. It's that simple. All that remains is to transfer the unpacked files to the memory card of the mobile device using a Card Reader or a regular USB cable from the "charging".
The right way
One of the emerging questions that needs clarification is how to unpack the cache on Android through a computer. Indeed, it is not enough to simply rewrite the unpacked data to an arbitrary location on the SD media. It all depends on the game developer. So, in most cases, you need to transfer the cache along the path: Android / Data / (name of the game program) or, which is most common, to Android / obb / (name). All this, as a rule, is indicated on the resource pages from where the cache is downloaded.
For some devices, it is acceptable to use the capacity of the internal storage. Note that there are many ways to transfer data from SD0 (built-in memory card) to SD1 (external). In particular, Obb-on-SD, FolderMount, and the drive replacement script cope with this. However, most owners of mid-range mobile gadgets will not face such problems.
Basic method
Let's consider how to unpack the cache for the game on Android using the solutions provided by the developers. First of all, you need to download the APK file of the desired game application to your gadget from the Google store or third-party resources. Install it and run. After that, the user will be informed that the program will download the data it needs from the Web. Sometimes a confirmation dialog box is displayed. This method is one of the most convenient, as it automatically determines the characteristics of the gadget and downloads the current cache. The only thing worth paying attention toattention is to the fact that download volumes of hundreds of megabytes require high-speed Wi-Fi, not 3G and, very slowly, outdated GPRS.
If the game directory is not exactly known
We mentioned earlier that files should be placed in a specific folder. However, how to properly unpack the cache if its name is not exactly known? In this case, you can proceed as follows:
- Install the game client (the same APK file).
- Run it and abort the cache download after a few seconds.
- The program will automatically create a folder with the desired name in Android/data or obb. It remains only to look carefully at the directories to determine where to put the cache files.
Perhaps this is one of the most accurate ways. Of course, you will have to "sacrifice" a few megabytes of traffic needed for the first files.
How to unpack the cache for the game from Gameloft
This developer of gaming applications is known to many. At least for Asph alt 8. One of the alternative ways to unpack the cache on Android, in the case of a game from Gameloft, is as follows:
- Download the APK installation file to your smartphone (tablet). Refrain from installing for now.
- Download the GLZip application (executable) and run it.
- In the window you need to select the command "View Links in APK" and specify the game file. The result will be the output of links for downloading and unpacking a particular cache, depending on the hardwaregadget configuration.
- Choose the right one (very easy). The common video accelerator Mali is designated here as ETC, Adreno - as ATC, PVRT, as you might guess from the abbreviation - PowerVR and, finally, DXT is needed for gadgets with Tegra.
- After downloading the selected cache, it must be extracted from the archive. The Unpack team will help solve this problem. Unpacking is carried out in the same directory where the packed file is located. Note that all data will be placed in the Sdfiles folder.
- The last step is to rename this directory to the desired name (discussed earlier) and transfer it to Gameloft/Games.
The advantage of this solution is the guarantee that there are no viruses in the cache, which is explained by the fact that the data is downloaded from the official GameLoft servers. In addition, the download speed in this case is quite worthy. Sometimes connoisseurs of games ask the question “How to unpack the cache?”, Although, as it may seem, everything is quite simple. The fact is that Rar and Zip archivers do not work with jar files, in which data for applications is sometimes distributed. GLZip does a great job of this.
Summing up
As you can see, there is nothing complicated about how to unpack the cache. The process is no more difficult than replacing files in a regular computer game. Recall the algorithm: downloading and installing the APK file - selecting the desired set in the provided archives - unpacking it and placing it in the required directory. That, in fact, is all.
