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

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

fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden) writes:

>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.

The slowness of compression would be more than offset by the savings in disk
space. You could always let the user decide which compression to use.

>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.

You're right, although what I've seen of the LZSS module (HPRT) hasn't
been very slow :).

>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.

This is a nice idea but a little over my head :).

If anyone wants to mail me the gnuzip archive format though I'll see about
writing a gnuzip/deflate -> pkzip archive converter (so you could use Angel
or PMPUnzip to extract them).


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