I believe uso is the resident expert! I've been trying to optimize
some of the games with better / smaller-sized cracks, and crunch them
with Exomizer 2.0 (latest release). I've not had success, but feel I'm
*almost* there. By way of an example, I found a smaller version of the
game Autobahn (only 33 blocks uncompressed = 16640 bytes = L$4100).
The program loads at $800 and JMPS directly to code at $2000 upon
running.
Now, I can get exomizer to produce a crunched .BAS program, by using
options by the following MS-DOS command:
Exomizer sfx basic AUTOBAHN.801
which is around $19F0 bytes in length and crunched. I import this
file into a .DSK image file, set it to a BINARY file type, load
address $801, then .JMP to $80B to attempt to execute the de-crunch
code, but it fails every time. The docs of Exomizer say that -t 162
(Apple II code) has been *disabled* for self-extracting code
generation. What magic has uso done to get his crunched games to work
on Apple II? Some insight and/or help would be appreciated, as I know
I can improve the size on many of the crunched games (and have done so
by deleting crack screens, title pages, extraneous code, etc). Just
need to get those games (and, others that he hasn't crunched)
packed!!!
uso's crunched games are BAS file type, but I've converted these to
BIN file types by manually modifying the load address to $803, then
manually going into the monitor and JMPing to $80B or $80D to directly
execute the decrunch code. Converting the file types to BIN makes
them usable by Beautiful Boot, which only will run BINary files.