Re: HPRT v1.0 posted on comp.binaries - HOORAY!

[fadden@hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden)]

In article <2s0a1k$pml@paris.ics.uci.edu> jlee@ics.uci.edu (Orion Pax) writes:
>Any chance of expanding this into an replacement for ShrinkIt?  It doesn't
>seems unlikely that ShrinkIt will ever be updated in the foreseeable future
>so how about you taking up the torch, Andy?

ShrinkIt and HardPressed try to solve two different problems.  ShrinkIt's
job is primarily as a way to transfer files over a modem while retaining
file attributes, secondarily as a file archiver for storage of old files.

HardPressed tries to reduce the amount of space occupied by files that you
want to have direct access to.  That's why HP emphasizes speed over
compression ratio, and provides you with several different choices for
compression method based on your needs.

If you want to improve ShrinkIt, the best option would be to add something
like LZH (a variant of LZSS used by almost every popular file archiver) to
ShrinkIt, since your primary concern is size rather than uncompression
speed.  If you want to *replace* ShrinkIt, you could start with the
publicly available Info-Zip sources, optimize them for 65816, and include
GS-specific support.

However, I don't think it would be for the best to create another file
archiving program, especially one that can only work on a IIgs.