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

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 11.12.2009, 19:30

> > > Use TAR before ZIPping or 7-ZIP instead of ZIP
> I disagree, probably a ZIP and a *nix friendly format are required or just
> ZIP. I see tar/gzip et al as fine if target is *nix but NOT if the target
> is for DOS/Windows, unless the target audience are very likely to have
> those tools but as I'm sure you appreciate the majority of people don't
> have them under DOS/Windows. So I guess that comes down to who this game
> is being aimed at? If it's mostly DOS/Windows people I would use the most
> common widely used format; in the case of DOS the most common format was
> and always will be ZIP (I'm excluding ARC...!).
Most people don't use ARC anymore or even know of a way to unpack it. But there is the freeware DOS Pascal DEARC tool.

> Yes things like ARC/LHA/RAR were common back in the day but to a
> *significant* lesser extent, they were and never as common as ZIP. And
> despite the limited success of LHA/RAR compared to ZIP they aren't exactly
> commonly installed on PC's anymore (LHA's use on the Amiga/BIOS's totally
> different subjects!).
As rr well knows, modern UNRAR has been compiled with DJGPP, so it works. However, I think the GNU folks consider it non-free (although it's free enough, I think).

> > The 7-Zip archiver even creates normal (compatible) Zip files with
> better
> > compression than some other programs.
> So does Winzip etc but the question then is can other programs unpack
> those ZIP's.

It's fully compatible output, I use it all the time. AdvanceComp (advzip) works well too (same 7-Zip rewritten / optimized Deflate). The latter just removes comments and extra fields, I think, which aren't important to 99% of users anyways. That doesn't affect the actual data at all. (It might also remove redundant Deflate EOS markers, which AFAIK nobody needs.)

> Start trying to get too clever with file archive compression
> and you end up shutting out people. e.g. I used LHA a lot back in the day
> (usually to automatically convert updated stuff from LHA into ZIP!),
> however a while back I had to spend a while surfing .jp sites and dealing
> with a Kanji version of LHA under Windows - all because someone
> distributing a DOS program "insisted" in using the *very* latest for LHA
> version that created LHA files that were unpackable by *any* of the
> versions for DOS or indeed any of the English Windows versions!

Must have used lh7, then, as LHA 2.55 would (undocumented) unpack lh6, just as PKUNZIP 2.50 would (also undocumented) unpack Deflate64 (Info-Zip too). BTW, you could always use LHA-UNIX (or its DJGPP compile).

7-Zip and Info-Zip (Zip 3.0 / Unzip 6.0) both support Bzip2 methods inside .ZIPs now, and 7-Zip also (unsurprisingly) supports LZMA. It's things like encryption that PKWare and WinZIP differed on (although IZarc and 7-Zip support both methods). BTW, p7zip (DJGPP compile) and 7za.exe + HX both work in DOS.

> Thus I
> think it is always the case of using the right tool for majority of the
> target platform. Hence if I'm distributing for Windows then no LHA, no
> RAR, no GZIP etc etc. And normally no ZIPS for Linux... which is why I
> feel probably 2 packages might actually be best here.
>
> But obviously I do appreciate other peoples opinions are different.
As you mentioned, modern Windows (since ME?? 2k??) support extracting ZIPs (thanks to liberal ZLIB license).

Ubuntu has Info-Zip (zip, unzip) installed by default, but sadly most others don't. .tar inside .zip is accepted and unpacked by GNU tar + GNU Gzip but not *BSD Gzip. If you want solid compression and remain .ZIP compatible, better to do "zip -0 file0 * && zip -9m file file0.zip".

BTW, a nice DOS .tar + .gz combined tool (w/ srcs but "non-commercial" only) is tar321#4.zip, e.g. "tar +gnu -c.9f myfile.tgz *.*".

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