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

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 28.06.2010, 06:45

> Correct the RTL source only came with Borland Pascal not Turbo Pascal.

I read some (very old) newsgroup post earlier today where someone said they bought the RTL (except Graph) for TP6. So I guess it was available even then.

> > and don't use Delay (obviously).
> Ok. The problem being I guess no good fix like newdelay currently
> available for TP5? If need be I would be happy some time to help back port
> it to TP5 just to help anyone keen to use TP5.
Only TP7 has the CRT startup bug, but TP55 still has a broken Delay. I think there are known fixes for that, but I haven't ever needed Delay yet.

> The key thing about versions after TP5 is obviously the inclusion
> of Asm over the harder to use inline.
TP6 introduced that, and yeah, it's more convenient, but at least there are tools (INLIN219.ZIP) for helping although even DEBUG probably is sufficient.

However, I also heard that TP55 and older aren't pmode friendly, hence using the wrong interrupt vectors, assuming hardcoded addresses, which aren't always true for pmode OSes. (Note that I don't 100% understand this and have no examples of proof, but you probably know what I'm referring to.)

> However importantly TP5 does of course also include external asm obj
> logic.
Yes, but I haven't tried that (and I hope it doesn't require explicit TASM or MASM object files or specific directives, e.g. "pascal"; I haven't tried yet but I hope JWasm or ArrowASM works).

> > To be honest, the only huge benefits to using TP55 at all (IMHO)
> > are 8086 compatibility and really small .EXE size.
> You meant he large EXE size :) Now I've shared some COM file generating
> code you can hopefully re-use that to get the added benefit of asm size
> with TP5!
Not sure how space much this saves, but I'll take a look later (if I don't forget!). ;-)

> > Otherwise I'd just use GPC or FPC or VPC or whatever.
> It is nice to have a mix, there are lots of options and I think it is
> choosing the right tool for the right job. FPC is very well written.
Yes, it's quite nice to have a lot of choices, even if I'm afraid that I annoy Marco due to that. ;-)

> > (Note that I'm a very very wimpy Pascal programmer now, heh,
> heh that's exactly how I would describe my C programming but I can do
> both.
Found three different Pascal to C converters: p2c, ptoc, ptc. (Yes, they all are named horribly, heh.) :-D

> > 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.
> Indeed and these are the things that I like about aPACK over UPX :)
Well, if you wanted to modify the stub, then okay. :-)

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