Re: LZ: New idea for compression program!
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Re: LZ: New idea for compression program!
On Sun, 8 Sep 1996, Scott J. Rein wrote:
> Last, we have a choice: either the program can be run like a normal ZShell
> program, or we can give the shell out as an 85B file so that it contains
> both a pointer to ZShell AND the shell. We would have to get permission
> from whoever made ZShell (to be able to distribute ZShell with our program)
> for the latter choice. This would be my choice though.
A better (?) way would be to make the decompressor run from ZShell, and have
the identifier byte that ZShell uses be different than that one, so the
decompressor knows that's what these strings are. Now, this program would find
all compressed strings, and display them like ZShell. It would be able to use
a multi-column format, since you would not get the description like in ZShell.
This program will simply decompress the string to a temporary one, and run it.
We should try to do this fast, and then work out what to do with saved games
and highscores, because it sounds like the best way is to change the way the
program works. So, if we release the compression stuff, and very few people
end up using it, then the programmers do not have to worry about it. If many
people start to use it, then maybe it will be added into ZShell, and all games
that wish to use compression (All of them I hope) will be changed to work with
the new ZShell (5.0?) like what happened with 4.0!
The nice thing about Windows is that it does
Tony Lieuallen not just crash... It displays a dialog
marvin@mars.superlink.net box and lets you press 'OK' first.
http://mars.superlink.net/marvin/home
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/1171/
References: