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Galactic Conquest v9 file compression / UPX vs aPACK (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 27.06.2010, 08:10

> > You could always use Frank Heckenbach's solution(s) in his
> > NewDelay.pas.
> Yes I fully agree Frank's unit works extremely well; I've used it many
> times.
He seems to provide three methods, all different, in case someone can't use the best one (apparently RTL srcs needed for #2).

> > Last I checked (recently?), Pedt's web page was valid but his download
> > links weren't. So he probably hasn't kept up-to-date.
>
> This is a active CRT.ZIP download link:
> ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/turbopas/crt.zip
My main issue is that so much code is TP7 only, which hampers using TP55 freeware. Or other code is too big and complex to use for simple projects. I basically hacked up my own (lame) routines to read in *nix LF files and convert paramstr(1) from LFN to SFN (int 21h, 7160h) and don't use Delay (obviously). To be honest, the only huge benefits to using TP55 at all (IMHO) are 8086 compatibility and really small .EXE size. Otherwise I'd just use GPC or FPC or VPC or whatever. (Note that I'm a very very wimpy Pascal programmer now, heh, only been barely coding it for a few months off and on.)

> > I like aPACK, but you can't unpack its output.
> A few days ago I spotted your comment on the above FASM discussion re Frank
> Zago's Intelligent
> Executable Unpacker (IUP) and I created various files for IUP to see
> how it performed. I was very impressed with how well it works. However as
> I expect you know there is a problem with IUP in that it often
> inadvertently appends extra data to the header/main body/end of a file.
> Certainly common with uncompressed aPACK files. Indeed often uncompressed
> EXE files simply don't work afterwords (corrupted) hence during a lot of
> RJDUMP updates the other night I added the following "informational"
> flagging: WARNING: Executable has been UNpacked with IUP! to allow
> people to clear spot them.
Also, keep in mind that Eric Auer and I had a conversation in e-mail a few years ago about how FreeDOS somehow handles differently the tempfile mechanism in IUP, so for that platform you'll probably have to run IUP in the root directory for it to fully work (kludge).

> > probably just use UPX (--ultra-brute --lzma --8086) as
> UPX is very good. I also added UPX SYS detection to RJDUMP as well. I
> haven't had time to add UPX EXE detection but it's on the cards probably
> next release.
See Robert's UPXDUMP tool if you haven't already.

> > aPACK barely saves anything extra.
> It depends. aPACK has a slightly more flexible license wise than UPX has.
aPACK 1.00 is freeware even for commercial use. UPX is free for any use, including commercial, but you must GPL your UPX modifications if you don't use their stock stubs. Also, last I heard, FSF considers UPX itself non-free (due to NRV) but the stubs themselves are okay. (I still haven't rebuild UPX-UCL 3.05, but I doubt most people care anyways besides Jim, and he hasn't asked, probably too busy. Should be pretty much the same as 3.04, I hope.)

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