DOS ain't dead

Ilia M.'s Gzip 1.2.4 "hack" (improved -9) (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 20.05.2009, 08:16

> I finally figured out how to compile Ilia M.'s Gzip 1.2.4 hack with
> OpenWatcom 1.8 (deflate_max improves -9 without being nearly as slow as
> 7-Zip). By default his only comes with a Win32 .EXE, which is annoying in
> pure DOS even with HXRT (needs LFNs). So I've built both DOS and Win32
> binaries.

Note that 1.2.4 is fairly old, and obviously 7-Zip compresses Deflate better, and you can use AdvanceDef (advdef -z4) to recompress your .gz files in place instead of manually unpacking / repacking. BUT ... if you only want a slight bit better compression with reasonable speed, the 1.2.4 hack will work okay.

P.S. I figured out that you can get the same results with DJGPP (GCC) only if you do -DNO_ASM and remove match.S from the makefile (since DJGPP optimizes better). Of course, it doesn't by default have the LFN-aware patch that the latest DJGPP port of Gzip (1.3.12) has. But whatever, just FYI.

Complete thread:

• Ilia M.'s Gzip 1.2.4 "hack" (improved -9) - Rugxulo, 20.05.2009, 05:30 (Announce)
  • Ilia M.'s Gzip 1.2.4 "hack" (improved -9) - Rugxulo, 20.05.2009, 08:16