Hi Mateusz,
The compression is a crude, back-referencing algorithm of my own design, called MVCOMP http://mateusz.fr/mvcomp/ Its compression rate is not spectacular, but it is not much worse than deflate, while being significantly simpler and faster.
I assume you enjoy designing algorithms, because there already are nice and lightweight existing ones, too :-) Some of this is topic of a thread about pondering compressed diskimage drivers for DOS on BTTR, sort of a VERY simple DOS-squashfs as distant cousin of doublespace, stacker and the like which would just compress each sector or cluster separately and store a table of compressed sector offsets for fast decompression. Back to the original topic of compressing AMB and similar content, the thread mentioned some suitable compression algorithms or packages :-)
I believe this should be of special interest to the FreeDOS project: the FreeDOS help is using AMB nowadays and the help file is painfully large.
As I prefer the ZIPped htmlhelp, I would say having compressed AMB helps the competition :-)
As a quick test I took the FDHELPEN.AMB file from the FreeDOS "AMBHELP 0.1d" package and repacked it with the compression-enabled AMB:
The manual decreased from 861K to 461K. (for comparison, ZIP packs it to 380K)
That makes a big difference compared to the old AMB, thank you for the update :-)
Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
