FILE INFORMATION

Ranked as 10213 on our all-time top downloads list with 4689 downloads.

SCREEN SHOTS

REVIEWS

Review

Review by  Kirk Meyer Reviewed on 2004-11-02 Suitability: 6/10 A few bugs make this area a problem. Dynamic decompression is also a must. Ease-Of-Use: 7/10 Use of plain old UnBloat is straight-forward. Using UnBloatAbs, however, is more difficult and is not very well documented. The same goes for calling the Bloat module. Overall: 7/10 A compression package with a bright future. It could be made better with a few minor changes. Bloat is a paradoxically named compression package for the TI-86. Bloat compresses data, and UnBloat decompressed it. The package uses the LZSS method of compression to shrink data, on average, by about fifty percent. Although the decompression code is provided, the compressor must be run as a library. This can be annoying for those who want to make minor adjustments to the code. Bloat does have some problems, however. The first is that, as the programmer has admitted, it has a major flaw in it which can cause the compression routine to do some crazy stuff. The decompressor, however, seems to work fine. Secondly, the directions as to how to use it are vague and unclear. And finally, the user must have a C compiler in order to use the computer-based compressor. This may be annoying for those users who do not have or do not wish to download a C compiler. Finally, this program does not give the option of automatic decompression (i.e. allowing programs to be decompressed at runtime).