First post, by Harry Potter
Hi! I have a library for cc65 and three of its targets called printtok. cc65 is a C compiler that runs on modern systems and compiles code for some 8-bit systems, and printtok is a module that prints strings compressed using tokenization and RLE of spaces. It is poor: its compression ratio is not good enough, and it requires the user to compress the strings. 🙁 I'm working on a better version which is to have several methods to compress literals, including 5 and 7 bits per literal and ways to better them. I'm asking, if I get it ready, if I should port it to DOS C compilers. I'm also asking for other ways to improve this. Mind you, I can't use lz77 or a variant, as each string can't reference another string, and I don't want to compress using Huffman codes, as it would require a lot of extra work, and I want to get it to work for very small 8-bit computers, such as the Vic20.
Joseph Rose, a.k.a. Harry Potter
Working magic in the computer community