Well, if you're going through the trouble of making a RAM disk and copying the files from the floppy onto the RAM disk, you could just as easily have a big { zip | tgz | tar.bz } archive on the disk, then extract it onto the RAM disk.

Erp, SirDice already said waht I just said, silly me. You could probably squeeze a few more bytes out of the disk by using a .tar.bz and a custom compilation of bzip that only unzips. Really, though, things generally don't compress twice. Disk compression *might* get you a few bytes by compressing the extraction program, but that's about it. Disk compression will probably not make a .zip file any smaller.

If you have net access, you could suck down some data from a server somewhere else...