DOS ain't dead

lDebug release 9 - Heatshrink compressed drives? (Announce)

posted by mceric, Germany, 21.12.2024, 16:00

Hello

Thanks for all those updates!

> Heatshrink compression of the online help pages is now enabled, shrinking
> the total resident size of the debugger as compared to using the
> uncompressed online help.

I had not known about that before, seems to be a variant of LZSS or LZ4:

https://github.com/atomicobject/heatshrink

https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/09/29/heatshrink...eight-compression-library-for-embedded-systems/

And for ESP32, there already is another, smaller variant, ESP32-Tamp:

https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=39798

If you ever feel bored, maybe you could consider building a heatshrinked version of SHSUCDHD? A possible implementation could be to keep a table of where compressed sectors start.

This could even evolve to compressed RAMDISKs, partitions and maybe also EMS or XMS memory: In those cases, the drivers could claim that you have N times more space than you actually have, dynamically moving compressed sectors/blocks/clusters to 1:1, 1:2 or 1:4 compressed areas. In case N was too optimistic because entropy went up, they can just claim remaining clusters (or memory) are used now. With too little safety margin, it could even happen that they have to report write errors, but that case should be avoided.

Just dreaming of a free DOUBLESPACE, DRIVESPACE or STACKER here Those used rather large compression blocks internally, which meant that they used a lot of RAM.

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

Complete thread:

• lDebug release 9 - ecm, 21.12.2024, 13:49 (Announce)
  • lDebug release 9 - Heatshrink compressed drives? - mceric, 21.12.2024, 16:00
    • lDebug release 9 - Heatshrink compressed drives? - ecm, 21.12.2024, 18:41
      • lDebug release 9 - Heatshrink compressed drives? - mceric, 21.12.2024, 22:55
    • lDebug release 9 - Heatshrink compressed drives? - DosWorld, 02.01.2025, 18:24