Crossdev Exe Crunchers

[pink^abyss]

Hi fellow coders,

do you know of any other crossdev exe crunchers beside Shrinkler and Cranker for Win32?

Shrinkler is great but too slow for my needs.
Cranker is great but pack ratio is not optimal.

So i look for something to decrunch faster then Shrinkler, and have better pack ratio then Cranker (and commandline Win32).
Any suggestions?

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Hi fellow coders,

do you know of any other crossdev exe crunchers beside Shrinkler and Cranker for Win32?

Shrinkler is great but too slow for my needs.
Cranker is great but pack ratio is not optimal.

So i look for something to decrunch faster then Shrinkler, and have better pack ratio then Cranker (and commandline Win32).
Any suggestions?

RNC Propack exists on Amiga and PC, so lightning fast packing on PC side of things and decent packing ratio and depack speed on Amiga side.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

RNC Propack exists on Amiga and PC, so lightning fast packing on PC side of things and decent packing ratio and depack speed on Amiga side.

Thanks for reply. The only pc version i found was from aminet and is no more executable with win32. Is there a win32 version available?

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Thanks for reply. The only pc version i found was from aminet and is no more executable with win32. Is there a win32 version available?

There is another version on github. However, pack ratio is only a tiny fraction better then Crankster in my case. Too bad.

[Frog]

there's a discussion about LZ4 on EAB and this one for Fastest depacker and another one about RNC Propack and a place for LZ4 packer and unpacker

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by Frog

there's a discussion about LZ4 on EAB and this one for Fastest depacker and another one about RNC Propack and a place for LZ4 packer and unpacker

I think Pink is looking for an exe packer though. I am not sure what the options are other than Shrinkler & Cranker, that can be run on Windows too.

Maybe it's would be a good project for someone, to create a new one that has a tradeoff of compression ratio for decompress speed on target platform.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by DanScott

I think Pink is looking for an exe packer though. I am not sure what the options are other than Shrinkler & Cranker, that can be run on Windows too.

Maybe it's would be a good project for someone, to create a new one that has a tradeoff of compression ratio for decompress speed on target platform.

Yeah, looks like there is really nothing available beside those two, and both are very specific.
A generic crossdev amiga exe cruncher would be a nice project, tho certainly beyond my comfort zone.. anyone interested?

[DanScott]

There's no reason why different algorithms couldn't also be selectable with a command line switch.

Maybe Leonard will make one... he's into his compression algorithms

[DamienD]

I always use CrunchyDat on any exe files, but it's Amiga only...

[mr.spiv]

Time to reincarnate stonecracker

[ross]

Yeah! S405!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by ross

Yeah! S405!

I tried STC 4.10.3. Compression is a tiny bit better then cranker.
Source 135kb
Cranker 77kb
STC 4.10.3 76kb
Shrinkler 60kb

I would like something that fills the gap between Shrinkler and Cranker

[ross]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

I tried STC 4.10.3. Compression is a tiny bit better then cranker.
Source 135kb
Cranker 77kb
STC 4.10.3 76kb
Shrinkler 60kb

I would like something that fills the gap between Shrinkler and Cranker

You should expect ZIP Deflate like compression from S405
But I leave it to mr.spiv to advertise it

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by ross

You should expect ZIP Deflate like compression from S405
But I leave it to mr.spiv to advertise it

Deflate brings it down to 72kb.

[mr.spiv]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

I tried STC 4.10.3. Compression is a tiny bit better then cranker.
Source 135kb
Cranker 77kb
STC 4.10.3 76kb
Shrinkler 60kb

I would like something that fills the gap between Shrinkler and Cranker

Considering the STC 4.10.3 has been untouched for 27 years I'd say it did well S405 (used in Smarty game) would be ideal for "streamed" loading of files. It's a bit slow to decompress but I might find joy modernizing it as it's only ~20 years old and also adding a better match finding algo. Now it only does straight forward lazy evaluation, which contributes to lesser compression ratio.

Btw.. is kick 1.3 support a must? Or are there cases where >= 2.0 would be OK as well?

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by mr.spiv

Considering the STC 4.10.3 has been untouched for 27 years I'd say it did well S405 (used in Smarty game) would be ideal for "streamed" loading of files. It's a bit slow to decompress but I might find joy modernizing it and adding a better match finding algo. Now it only does straight forward lazy evaluation.

Btw.. is kick 1.3 support a must? Or are there cases where >= 2.0 would be OK as well?

Do you mean for an amiga gui?
My need is an exe cruncher that must run from Win32 commandline (like Shrinkler & Cranker) as i use it for crossdev. Of course just a C source for cunrching would be fine too and everyone could cook his own tool with it.

The exe must decrunch on Kick 1.3 and higher. I'd use it for developing games and intros on A500 (like CODA, Tiny Bobble, Tinyus, etc).

ps.: Cool you are still doing amiga work. Stonecracker was a Masterpiece!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

I tried STC 4.10.3. Compression is a tiny bit better then cranker.
Source 135kb
Cranker 77kb
STC 4.10.3 76kb
Shrinkler 60kb

I would like something that fills the gap between Shrinkler and Cranker

I thought Shrinkler would be the 'GOLD' standard for compression but Paq8pxd goes even far beyond:

Paq8pxd 49kb

[DanScott]

PAQ8 requires huge amounts of memory for decompression though AFAIK...

[ross]

Originally Posted by DanScott

PAQ8 requires huge amounts of memory for decompression though AFAIK...

PAQ8 is a CM based compressor.
Context mixing algorithms are based on Bayesian inference, so it usually store the models in memory both at compression and decompression.

From Paq8px command line help:

      -1 -2 -3 = faster (uses 372, 386, 414 MB)
      -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 = smaller (uses 471, 584, 810, 1263, 2170, 3982 MB)

Not too much Amiga friendly

Not to mention the execution speed...

[DanScott]

It did shave another 600 bytes or so, off my 4k intro though