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AMB - the Ancient Machine Book format

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First post, by mateusz.viste

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These past few days I was working on a new hobby project. It is called AMB, and it is a simple hyperlink format that makes it possible to create "books" that are easy to read even on very limited hardware.

The "books" can be viewed with a tool named AMB. It is only a few kilobytes big and requires about 80K of available RAM.

As a demo, I converted the FreeDOS help into an AMB book. This is something that I will use as the help tool in the Svarog386 FreeDOS distribution. The AMB reader, as well as the format specification and the converted FreeDOS help file can all be downloaded on the project's home page:

http://mateusz.fr/amb/

It is still a very much work-in-progress project, but perfectly functional already. I will certainly add a few features during incoming weeks (mouse support, some form of light compression, full-text search, etc).

// EDIT: updated the project's url

Last edited by mateusz.viste on 2025-08-27, 13:21. Edited 1 time in total.

http://mateusz.fr

Reply 1 of 2, by Jo22

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That's very interesting, IMHO! 😎

Your work reminds me a bit of the old DXF and HPGL graphic formats, by the way.
(In the spiritual sense.)

They used to be in plain ASCII, too and were meant to be platform independent.

Another program thing that comes to mind is the SFML description language in LCARS 24.

It's versatile and XML based, if memory serves.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 2 of 2, by mateusz.viste

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Last night I published a new version of the AMB toolset, with an updated specification. The major change is that now AMB is capable of compression using the MVCOMP algorithm.

For example, using this compression the size of the FreeDOS AMB manual shrinks from 861K to 461K. This comes with no performance penalty (compressed files load actually faster) and same memory requirements.

The new tools are of course still perfectly capable of reading (and producing) old-style uncompressed AMB files.

http://mateusz.fr

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