From: Andrew Collier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Nick Humphries wrote: > >> From: Andrew Collier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> >Personally I don't see anything wrong with the currect tactic of saving >> >.dsk images and gzipping them. >> >> PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression >> routine which is portable between the various platforms? > >PCs don't have sim-coupe by default. Your point? Well, you could make installation a hell of a lot easier by not asking the user to find and install various external programs before you can get SimCoupe running. It's bad enough that you have to find, download and install the sound chip driver. IMHO everything should be in a single install set, and ideally as a single program. >I'd say you'd be hard >pressed to find a PC owner who couldn't decode - or encode, for that >matter - a .gz file. I disagree. It depends who you aim the emulator at. If you're going for your regular emulation fan, then most of them would only recognise .ZIP files or self-extracting EXEs. Any other type of compression (gzip, lha, arc, whatever) would require a more techie type of person who'd know about these less common (in PC-land) compressors. >There's little point to reinventing the wheel, and you'd need to work >quite hard to make your customized compression algorithm work better than >gzip anyway. Who says it has to be better than gzip? It just needs to be better than having raw DSK files. Nick Humphries.
