Replacement for Shrinkit

[tlarson@pro-greens.benton-city.wa.us (Tom Larson)]

fadden@hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden) writes:

>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.

The Apple II world desperately needs a better archiver. The interface for
Shrinkit and GShk is great, but the compression routines leave something to
be desired. Would Andy Nicholas consider releasing the source code?

The best compression I've seen is generally pkzip/info-zip deflation, and
once the compression/decompression engine was done you could handle .zip and
gnuzip.

>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.

True, but with the heavy volume of new PC archivers (ha, uc2, rar, hap, etc)
it wouldn't be unprecedented.


Internet: tlarson@pro-greens.benton-city.wa.us