Re: Hardpressed and Salvation

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <4l8u7e$8cj@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
RUBYWAND <rubywand@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <151510973.39071096@adbbs.antioch.edu>,
>John_L._Graham@adbbs.antioch.edu (John L. Graham) writes:
>>I'm still wondering if using a disk compression utility like HardPressed
>will
>>cause problems with disk maintenance utilities like Salvation or ProSel.
>>Sounds like I'll just have to try it and find out *B^/

>    All software-based hard disk compression schemes cause problems.
>Mainly, there are always programs which want to access the HD directly.
>Wares which circumvent the normal OS do not work correctly if HD data is
>in some weird format.

   Yeah, but if they're HD installable if your HD is not compressed in
any way, they really tend to work a-ok with compression. I have 90-odd
games on my GS compressed with HardPressed; the only one that had
problems when compressed was Xenocide. If the XENOCIDE.SYS16 file was
compressed, it would ocmplain and look for a 3.5" disk, but if it was
uncompressed (yet with all the data files compressed), it ran great.

  Granted that a good number of these games were ones from Softdisk
which strives for maximum compatability and never does any copy
protection garbage.


>    The best example is in PC-ville. Software-based HD compression enjoyed
>a spurt of popularity but has been dropped by most users because many new
>games use incompatible custom OS's.

   Err, what the heck are you talking about? Win95 and other things
that eat HDs for lunch have been a great selling point for
compression. And would you care to specify exactly _which_ games
written in the last 2 years have gone to custom OS's that access the
HD and break compression? When MS-DOG 6.0 came out, sure, some things
may have been broken, but if your software won't work on the 2-40% of
people that use compression, you've locked yourself out of the market.

   Disk-based copy protection is passe. Booklets, etc are in.

>    Another common complaint is speed. Retrieving small and medium-size
>files may take a bit longer. On the other hand, large files come in more
>quickly because savings in load time more than offset time used for
>decompression.

   For many files, the time to decompress is way faster than the time
to read off the HD, especially with a 486 or better processor. Certain
friends have said that booting their Windoze boxes was faster after
compressing things because the HD is the slow link in the chain.

   On the GS, though, compression can slow things down a bit.

>    All of this assumes that the compression/expansion software is free of
>serious bugs. Also, you must have enough RAM to handle the extra
>operations involved.

   Well, if it's MS-DOG 6.x (x < 22), yeah, buggery is a problem. Hard
Pressed, never encountered any bugs. As to ram, 40-50K of memory is NOT
a problem for most people who own hard drives-- PCs come with about 8MB
memory as a base. GS users with <2MB usually don't have HDs either, so
compression is out.


>    Even with SCSI, upgrading hard disk size is no longer an extraordinary
>expense. Once IIgs gets a good E-IDE interface, we'll be able to add 2GB
>units (for less than $300)  and just forget about software-based HD
>compression altogether.

   2GB disks? That's either a ton of ProDOS partitions, or a few large
ones for the hopefully bugfree HFS one. Not like you're gonna really
_want_ to store 2GB of stuff on a GS.

Nathan Mates

-- 
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
# And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the
# Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in 
# parables" Mark 4:11, NRSV