Similar questions have been asked on this forum, but not identical, so I am sorry if this is a bit redundant.
I have made a "portable" application. I used WINRar to create an SFX self-extracting archive. You double-click the .exe, it extracts all files (~600 MB) to a working folder in the current directory, and then automatically executes the program.
Only problem is it takes about 5-8 minutes to extract the first time, then about 20 seconds every subsequent time for the executable to find out all the files are already extracted (i.e. it does quite a bit of work to find out all the work it does not need to do). I know portables can be made much better than this.
So my question: is it possible to extract only the main program's executable and its most-used files (~13 MB) to a working folder in the current directory, then point that executable to whatever files it need which are still within the SFX archive? Or for that matter, operate entirely from the SFX archive? If I just use the "store" option when building the SFX archive, the files shouldn't even need to be decompressed first, correct? So all the files are there, I just don't know how to access them without taking 8 minutes to copy them from an uncompressed archive to an uncompressed folder. Using files directly from the uncompressed SFX archive shouldn't even slow the program down, should it? Does anybody have any suggestions?
Thank you!