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Disgusted by FreeDOS 1.3RC installation CD (Users)

posted by Ringding, 03.05.2021, 17:22

> The R. Loew memorial home page has a REPACKER program that can decode this
> file: https://rloewelectronics.com/distribute/REPACKER .

I actually went through these in the hopes of finding something like that, but because this particular one has no description in the table of contents, I missed it somehow. ;-)

So this method encodes groups of 26 bits into 4 ASCII characters, where each place in the resulting ASCII string can be one out of an alphabet of 92 characters – this is what the encoder does; the decoder, which REPACKER.C constitutes, does the opposite, obviously. An alphabet size of 91 would actually be enough to cover the entire value range of 26 bits. Although nothing would be gained from using 91; the highest value used is 125 now, so there would even be room for one or two more, but 127 might be problematic, so in reality just one.

So you might call it "Base92". It is obviously slightly more efficient than the somewhat widely used "Base85" (23% size increase vs. 25%).

 

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