I was wondering when I read it on irc, but why the need to compress? It's 2012, everyone can spare the 3 (or maybe 4) MB it saves. And the download won't matter, too, since the whole thing is compressed anyway...

Other than that, the more svn builds the merrier 😉

Compression poses several problems if you're offering an SVN build and DosBox's binary isn't all that huge.
For example: antivirus programs don't really trust compressed binaries a lot lately.

I did it because it speeds up load time. Also, I checked it out if it caused false positives and it does not.

WilliamC wrote:

I did it because it speeds up load time. Also, I checked it out if it caused false positives and it does not.

Well...that IS weird (speeding up load times).
Did you check with every antivirus?

It doesn't really matter if it is NOW not a false positive. Upx stuff gets readded all the time...
How *can* load times be better? It has to load the file from the harddrive and only then is it in memory. How did you measure this?

There is no difference with load times. I replaced the version I uploaded with a non UPX version. Don't know what all the hubub was about.

And what about the speed? How does it fare against other svn builds?

Well, it seems to score 10-20 FPS higher on the latest EmuCR SVN. I don't know of any other being actively compiled.

That's quite some gain 😉

bloodbat wrote:

WilliamC wrote:

I did it because it speeds up load time.

Well...that IS weird (speeding up load times).

Hard disk bandwidth is so low, compared to RAM, that it is almost always faster to load a compressed file and uncompress it in RAM. I don't know if it is also valid for SSDs.

That being said, the difference should not be perceptible for such a small file, and indeed, according to WilliamC, it isn't.