Hi Tom, > On Jan 16, 2025, at 1:44 PM, tom ehlert via Freedos-devel > <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > >> Recording in MONO instead of COLOR will roughly double the capacity. But, it >> won’t look as pretty when simply viewing the log. > > recording in COLOR, the color would be an good candidate for compression; > even trivial runlength encoding > would probably provide excellent compression ratio as color rarely changes. > > Tom
You are correct. I did consider implementing RLE for COLOR and probably TEXT data. However, I decided not use it in the initial version for a couple reasons. As you are aware, RLE is very simple and easy to implement even in assembly for both encoding and decoding. But, it would add a little more complexity and a couple bytes of code to the program. Being lazy, I decided that for the initial version, it would only be as complex as required to accomplish what I wanted. This is also the reason that I did not add a couple other features I was considering. For example, hot-key support to turn on/off logging, perform screen captures and some other minor things. Although it does not use RLE at present, it does do a little work to reduce memory consumption. Based on the various methods being used to capture text and the contents of the lines being logged, a line can consume as little a 2-bytes. On average during testing when in 80x25 text mode, MONO uses about 1k per screen/page (COLOR about 2k). When given a tiny 256K XMS memory buffer, it can store about 128 color pages of information before beginning to discard older lines. The lack of RLE is one of the reasons that I decided not to enable support for storing the log data in the lower 640k. Once allocated, using that memory for the log is not any different than when stored in a UMB. The code for logging to LOW memory is in LOGGER. But, it is disabled for now in the binary. Logger is also very fast. While I am sure that you could use a benchmark program to see a small reduction in overall command line text output performance, you will not notice it is running. Adding RLE would effect performance. However, the effect could be improved speed when logging to XMS. After all, RLE is very quick and would reduce the amount of data that would need sent to XMS. While I think LOGGER is awesome as-is, it can definitely be made even better. :-) Jerome > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
