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

[fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)]

In article <1994May26.200454.14001@pro-greens.benton-city.wa.us> tlarson@pro-greens.benton-city.wa.us (Tom Larson) writes:
>>What doesn't GSHK 1.1 do that we _need_?
>
>Um, compress well? I can live without it, I have a PCTransporter (it becomes
>useful at last) and can use pkzip. But think of the savings in disk space for
>ftp sites, bulletin boards, whatever for people without a PCT.
>
>Alternatively we can use shrinkit to archive the files without compression
>and use info-zip or pkzip to compress them. It would be nice to have one
>utility that does both though.

Don't forget that compression is a CPU-intensive operation, and the IIgs
CPU isn't all that powerful.  The compression used in things like LHA,
PKZIP, GNU Zip, and most other current archivers is LZH, an extension of
the LZSS algorithm implemented in HardPressed.

If you think the LZSS module (which is hand-optimized assembler) is slow,
you won't be satisfied with an Orca/C port of PKZIP.

Don't forget that the HardPressed module format is defined, and sample
modules are on the HP disk (and if you're really serious about writing
modules, I can send you copies of the sample modules that don't have bugs
in them :-) ).  If you have access to GEnie, you can get copies of a wide
variety of compression algorithms that can be easily converted to HP
module format... just download the class I did for A2U (12 lessons worth,
the ShrinkIt archives fill an 800K disk).  You especially want lesson 12,
which discusses writing HP modules.

-- 
fadden@amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)  [These are my opinions, not Amdahl policies]

	  You get what you pay for, if you know what you are doing.
 PGP		    Otherwise, you get what you deserve.		 RIPEM