] You'd be surprised, I think.  Anyway, the issue is the trade-off between
] fast decompression or a good compression rate.  More advanced compression
] techniques like LZW (as used in GIF) bring pretty good compression but
] decompression is slow on MSX and needs a lot of (temporary) memory...
Not true. LZW compression is a litle bit slow but decompression is amazingly 
fast and hardly uses any temporary memory. I have used LZW compression on MSX 
for years. When loading graphics from disk, it is in general faster to load 
and decompress an LZW compressed file then to load the original uncompressed 
file. Even on [EMAIL PROTECTED] MHz.

The only problem with LZW is that it is patented nowadays by Unisys and can 
therefore not be used without paying a license fee to that company. That is 
the reason that I dropped LZW and developed an LZ77-based 
compression/decompression engine. You can find the C sources of these on my 
homepage, as I used the LZ77-based compression/decompression engine for 
XSC/XSD. I'm also planning to release the Z80 assembly based version some 
day, after I have made the readme files, etc. I will donate it to the RPG 
game engine project if anybody is interested...


Kind regards,
Alex Wulms

-- 
Visit The MSX Plaza (http://www.inter.nl.net/users/A.P.Wulms) for info
on XelaSoft, Merlasoft, Quadrivium, XSA Disk images, the MSX Hardware list,
SD-Snatcher on fMSX, documentation and lots more.



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