Why are the majority of psx isos stored in a layer of archives like this
rar -> .7z'd bin -> ecm'd bin
Wouldn't multiple iterations of compression algorithms be redundant and actually add onto the resulting file size due to adding headers and such onto data that is already as compressed as can be, no?
The script which packs the isos into multiple archive layers also changes the .bin's name so that it doesn't match the name inside the .cue file. I've also found several isos where in the case of multiple tracks the script must have changed track names from .bin to .ape for some reason.
It's very tedious to decompress these multiple layers especially the ecm on distributions of linux where they don't provide ecm packages, so you have to search for the ecm source code and compile yourself, this isn't hard, but some people probably wouldn't be able to do it.