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DOS Game - Galactic Conquest v9.00 test ( off topic) (Announce)

posted by ecm Homepage E-mail, Düsseldorf, Germany, 11.12.2009, 19:01

> Correct. e.g. In the case of actual disk storage you have default
> allocation (minimum) units, e.g. 512 bytes in size. Thus if you have a
> file of 10 bytes it will from the file systems perspective take up 512
> bytes of space [if 512 bytes is the default allocation unit]. So if in
> this case you have 2 files of 10 bytes each then separately they are
> taking up 1024 bytes (1k) of space.
> If you combine them together they instead only take up 512 bytes; which is
> still enough space for several DOS games certainly even large 256 sized
> ones.
That doesn't apply this way to compression as the archive formats usually provide an optimized kind of "file system" that's designed to avoid this and other problems. (Plus you forget to mention saving the directory entries, of course.)

However, various compression methods work by noting in the output (i.e. compressed) stream occurances of the data to compress next that came earlier in the input (i.e. source) stream. If no such earlier copy of the data sequence can be found, the sequence has to be stored in more "expensive" in the output stream (as literal bytes, or by using other ways of compression that aren't as effective as marking doubled sequences). With such methods, and archive formats that compress each file's data separately, splitting the same data into multiple files decreases the achievable compression ratio because the compression has less reference data to work with.

> Well it either means you are several years younger than many of us or you
> weren't as sad as we were in getting involved with computers when things
> like playing computer games were very unfashionable.
Yeah, I only got into this stuff when DOS was publicly declared quite dead already.

> Still I digress/get off my lawn and all that!
Oh I don't think a bit of this bothers anyone here. At least not me, and therefore I'd say it must be our official policy ;-)

> Indeed. These days I like the whole system to myself. So remind me what
> is a TSR again? heh
Oh but I can't live without CmdEdit or FDAPM/IDLEDPMS or that text-mode clock thingy anymore. The XMS driver is required anyway. Not to mention how important my debugger is for development, and after all it stays resident during debugging too.

An absolute requirement, however, is a keyboard layout driver. Working without the driver is just painful. The minor changes (such as exchanged Z and Y keys) are non-issues, but most punctuation and additional characters on the right are mapped differently with the German layout. One doesn't get US-layout keyboards at retail here either.

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l

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