On 9/10/07, Simon Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 9/9/07, James Paige <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 06:06:30PM +1200, Ralph Versteegen wrote:
> > > On 9/7/07, James Paige <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Ack! How the heck did I forget hspeak? No wonder I had room for
> > > > madplay+oggenc :(
> > > >
> > > Good news! We forgot UPX!
> > >
> > > After running game and custom through UPX on brute force strength
> > > (eclipsed only by the ULTRA-BRUTE setting in terms of CPU wastage) I
> > > managed add madplay, oggenc, plotdictionary.html and whatsnew.txt into
> > > the floppy package with just 37kb of floppy space to spare. Yes, it
> > > takes several minutes to compress each of game and custom, but we're
> > > only doing it once.
> > > Why did you leave whatsnew.txt out anyway? Forgot again?
> > >
> > > The commands: (should we add upx.exe to /support?)
> > > upx --brute game.exe
> > > upx --brute custom.exe
> >
> > Interesting. I had totally abandoned UPX, because when I last tried it
> > (years ago) compressing with UPX compressed EXEs always resulted in ZIP
> > compression what was worse than if I had never used UPX... but I didn't
> > know about --brute, and I guess UPX's compression algorithms could have
> > improved since then.
I had a 2002 version of UPX. Updating, I found they greatly simplified
the commandline options (--brute is new), and it seems compression is
also a lot better. But UPX does much better than zipping. (.zip is a
pretty bad format anyway) See below
> >
> > > (If we were really desperate to squeeze out extra kB, we could
> > > decompress oggenc, madplay and hspeak and recompress them at brute
> > > force strength (which tries 36 compression settings), and do
> > > SDL_mixer.dll too (compressed dll's can't be shared between programs
> > > using the same dll, but this shouldn't be too big a problem for our
> > > custom build)
> >
> > Actually, that is probably a good thing. Since we are not installing our
> > dll's system-wide, it is better that they can't be shared with other
> > apps.
> >
> > > We could run nightly builds of game and custom through UPX at --best
> > > setting too: this shaves about 100kb off the zips, and only takes a
> > > couple seconds.
> >
> > The nightyly builds run on a Qemu instance on a MacOS X box, and they
> > are slooow, so it would be a heck of a lot more than a few extra
> > seconds-- but it could still be worth it.
> >
>
> What's a floppy disk?
>
> Seriously, this machine is now about 9 years old, and I can probably
> count the number of times I've used a floppy on two hands (in fact,
> the only occasion I can remember was when I needed some files off my
> Atari ST, which was a 720k floppy anyway).
>
> I use USB drives for carrying things around these days, and my
> smallest capacity is 16Mb.
I don't have a USB drive, I burn CDs for large stuff (since it is
generally things that I would like a backup of anyway), use networks,
and occasionally floppies when windows dies or I boot into pure DOS or
I want to use an old 486 I have lying around.
>
> I really don't see the point in spending a lot of time on this.
Well, if anyone uses it they'd might like those utilities. If it's
scrapped, I think we could still do with ohrrpgce_play, since a lot of
OHR games come without (or with old builds of) Game, and the full
distribution is quite large.
> I'm sure UPX compression can be beaten by non-executable compression,
> such as the free open-source 7zip. Is this distribution supposed to be
> executable from the floppy or just unpackable from the floppy?
OK, I tried out 7zip:
Using game.exe at various UPX compression, and trying zip -9, 7zip
(ultra, deflate), winrar (best compression) to produce .zips, and also
a .7z:
game.exe: 662,528 bytes
zip: 258,250
7zip: 248,607
winrar: 257,933
game.7z: 182,914
game.exe through UPX --best: 208,384
zip: 204,933
game.exe through UPX --brute: 189,952
zip: 187,324
winrar: 187,165
7zip: 186,751
game.7z: 189,264
So UPX --brute shaves 70kb off the zip.
7zip did better .zip compression than anything else, but it was still
way off UPX. I should note that UPX tries LZMA, the default algorithm
for .7z files., while zips morely use the notsogood deflate algorithm.
TMC
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