Re: LZ: New idea for compression program!
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At 03:30 PM 9/9/96 -0400, you wrote:
>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 problem which Barry made me realize is that the shell will take up space. I
don't know what type of compression I will get on the programs, so that shell
space may take up a lot of what we get back.
Instead, read my message just before this. It contains infromation on how I
plan
to do the compression. Tell me what you think.
-- Scott Rein
srein@rain.org
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