Don't know if this matters, but Joergen Ibsen (a.k.a. Jibz) seems to be a terrific guy and may be willing to do whatever the FreeDOS project might need license-wise. Two days ago he made a custom modification to aPack for me ...
As you know, I'm using the FreeDOS kernel as the default OS to boot the forthcoming version of SpinRite 6. SpinRite 6 has two "parts", a standard 16-bit segment MZ-format program (the DOS-side of SpinRite) which is what runs under the FreeDOS kernel, and a 32-bit PE-format Windows program (the Windows-side of SpinRite) which formats and builds a bootable diskette, ISO, or IMG file for the user. (All of that part is completed as of last night and here http://www.grc.com/miscfiles/sr6-009.exe if you're curious.)
But, the trick is that BOTH of these separate programs are bound into a single EXE by using the DOS-side MZ as the "DOS stub" of the 32-bit Windows PE program. Thus SpinRite runs when the EXE is run from DOS and the Windows-hosted SpinRite boot-maker runs when the EXE is run from Windows.
The problem was that a UPX'd MZ can't be used as a DOS stub because it uses the DWORD at offset 0x3C at the end of the MZ header where the PE format places the pointer to jump over the MZ and locate the start of the PE file. I looked at rebuilding UPX, but I ran into the same situation of the good compression code not being available and not even linkable from modified UPX sources.
aPack also uses every byte past the minimum MZ header, but since it achieves even better compression than UPX (as you guys have noted) I dropped Joergen a note asking him whether there was any chance that he could add a new command-line option to aPack to cause it to leave the four-byte range from 0x3C-0x3F alone. The next day I received a modified version of aPack with a new "-g" option which does just that ... and it worked perfectly.
I imagine that he would enjoy having aPack being used as the compressor for your FreeDOS work, and perhaps he'd be willing to make an amendment to his license if that would help?
///
And, by the way, if SpinRite would ever be of any use to any of you kernel gurus, please let me know. I'll be very pleased to provide you with a copy free of charge, anytime. Being able to use the FreeDOS kernel really gets me out of a bind, and it's working great! :)
Thanks again, Steve.
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