Which packer is the best?

edited May 2008 in Development
Hello folks,
we are currently preparing an update to our Disk-Magazine SCENE+. However, looks like more and more coder groups in the Spectrum-Scene don?t pack their products anymore. In order to save space on disk and also to avoid long loading times to our few tape-subscribers we pack everything on our mag.

But what is the best packer to use? I use still the rather old (1992) TURBO IMPLODER. Does anybody know if there are better ones available? Of course should be working on normal Spectrum, no Pentagon or other clones. And available as TAP-File, not TR-DOS. Why we still have no way to emulate TR-DOS on other Disk-Systems....aaaargh....

Short announcement: We will start competitions for programmers. Best game released only on Scene+, best utility and best conversion from TR-DOS. Send in your works, finally some money waits for you to win. More on this later in another section.

Regards

Thomas
www.sintech-shop.de/home/spectrum-user-club.html
Post edited by Speccyman on

Comments

  • edited March 2008
    http://lvd.nm.ru/MegaLZ/ has some comparisons between various Spectrum packers.

    Last time I looked Exomizer 2 wasn't included in the benchmarks; I haven't tried it myself but I've heard it's pretty good:

    http://www.speccy.org/metalbrain/exo_v3.zip
  • edited March 2008
    As for best compression, I'd say it goes:

    1 - exomizer 2
    2 - pucrunch
    3 - aPLib

    but it always depends on the data, as different packers get better results with different sets of data. aPLib sometimes beats pucrunch, and with a certain game I packed recently it even beat exomizer 2.
  • edited March 2008
    Hello, I am glad for your answers but it is not what I asked for. I wanted a packer for normal Spectrum, not for PC, TR-DOS machines or PENTAGON. All I got now are SCL and PC-Files. Isn?t there a good packer running on real Spectrum since 1992? We have all kind of files, graphics, sounds, codes...

    Regards

    Thomas
  • edited March 2008
    The Spectrum's resources are so tiny that it's difficult to get any kind of decent compressor running on it. These tools do the compression on the PC but the decompression is done on the Spectrum. Surely that's what you need?
  • edited March 2008
    Speccyman wrote: »
    Hello, I am glad for your answers but it is not what I asked for. I wanted a packer for normal Spectrum, not for PC, TR-DOS machines or PENTAGON. All I got now are SCL and PC-Files. Isn?t there a good packer running on real Spectrum since 1992? We have all kind of files, graphics, sounds, codes...

    Regards

    Thomas

    Ah right, I thought you just meant it had to be able to decompress on a regular Spectrum!

    I don't know how good it is compared to Turbo Imploder, but File Compressor might be worth a look:

    http://user.sezampro.yu/~mstancevic/File_Compressor/File_Compressor.htm
  • edited March 2008
    I used to use Mr Pack to pack my files onto +D disc, it works very well, and all packing/unpacking is done on the Spectrum (48K/128K). I've just checked, and it is in the WOS archive, along with Mr Pack 2, which I'd never even heard of.

    I don't know how good Mr Pack is compared to other Spectrum packers, as I've never used any others, and it's a 1991 program, so it's earlier than you'd like, but it never crashed for me, so I'd recommend it if you can't find anything better.

    Good luck, and please let us know which packer you find to be best.



    By the way, how do you get a WOS archive page into a link on these posts? I wanted to link to Mr Pack but couldn't find out how to.
  • edited March 2008
    There were some good packers available for the Amiga in 1990 onwards. Many wouldn't be too difficult to disassemble and convert to the speccy.
  • edited March 2008
    Ah yes the XPK libraries on O.S 3.0 bring back fond memories.
  • edited March 2008
    There's a TAP version of Hrust somewhere... unfortunately Hrumer's website seems to be a bit dead for me, and I'm not sure where else you might be able to get it. I'll dig around a bit deeper for a copy if required.

    Hrust is probably the packer I use most often (albeit in my self-hacked PC command-line version) - the only place it doesn't really work is 1K/4K intros, where you're better off with a simpler and smaller routine to minimise overheads.

    Another one from the same era as Turbo Imploder is Tompacker. Back in the mid 90s I switched from one to the other... unfortunately I can't remember which way round it was :-(. I *think* Tompacker was the later and better one. Both of them are pretty good really, and I reckon that on a typical 48K demo they'll get within 2-3K of what Hrust can achieve.

    Incidentally, Mr Pack 2 (and presumably Mr Pack 1 as well, although I never tried that) is a bit rubbish in comparison to those - IIRC the results were often 30-50% bigger, and the depacker is the slowest thing in the world. On the plus side, it had that famous fzzt-fzzt-fzzt border effect, which was apparently enough reason for everyone to stick with it even when there were much better alternatives around (hello icabod :-))
  • edited March 2008
    Speccyman wrote: »
    Hello, I am glad for your answers but it is not what I asked for. I wanted a packer for normal Spectrum, not for PC, TR-DOS machines or PENTAGON. All I got now are SCL and PC-Files. Isn?t there a good packer running on real Spectrum since 1992? We have all kind of files, graphics, sounds, codes...

    Regards

    Thomas
    The problem is that compression is VERY expensive in terms both of memory and cpu. For example, the common LZ algorithm repeatedly search for patterns on every byte of data. In addition, optimal compressing involves such things like creating dynamic trees to find shortest way from beginning of file to its end.
    Complexity of writing compressor in C or Java is much lesser than writing same thing in Z80 assembler (as you dont want to wait several hours until compression finishes) and coder do not need care about available memory (that can be solved by swapping on floppy if available).
    In the result, the native compressors are at least one class below cross-target compressors. Note that there is not problem with decompressor as compression and decompression are asymetric tasks in both cpu and memory expenses.
  • edited March 2008
    seems like you don't know about zx rar. this is a stand alone archiver, compatible to standard rar to some degree. it also has zx only mode, without long headers and a source text for depacker. i used it to pack some data in our demos, but then switched to megaLZ, just because rar is harder to unpack (temporal buffers, etc..). though, it produces the best results for compression on speccy, i've seen.

    btw, packer works only with tr-dos.

    http://trd.speccy.cz/system/ZXRAR032.ZIP
  • edited March 2008
    elfh wrote: »
    seems like you don't know about zx rar. this is a stand alone archiver, compatible to standard rar to some degree. it also has zx only mode, without long headers and a source text for depacker. i used it to pack some data in our demos, but then switched to megaLZ, just because rar is harder to unpack (temporal buffers, etc..). though, it produces the best results for compression on speccy, i've seen.

    btw, packer works only with tr-dos.

    http://trd.speccy.cz/system/ZXRAR032.ZIP

    so far i was aware of PMC(LZ with huffman backend). does ZXRAR support arithmetic backend ?
  • edited March 2008
    Fikee wrote: »
    so far i was aware of PMC(LZ with huffman backend). does ZXRAR support arithmetic backend ?

    sorry, can't tell you much on this. feel free to contact author directly: alonecoder. i am sure, dmitry will be glad to answer your questions.
  • edited April 2008
    gasman wrote: »
    Incidentally, Mr Pack 2 (and presumably Mr Pack 1 as well, although I never tried that) is a bit rubbish in comparison to those - IIRC the results were often 30-50% bigger, and the depacker is the slowest thing in the world. On the plus side, it had that famous fzzt-fzzt-fzzt border effect, which was apparently enough reason for everyone to stick with it even when there were much better alternatives around (hello icabod :-))

    Hello Gasman.
    I only spotted this thread now as I just did a quick search for me on the forums :)
    I actually used to use Turbo Imploder as I didn't like the fzzt-fzzt thing - you're thinking of Bogie, who seemed to really like that for depacking. I sometimes gave pklite, pkhuff, or hqpack a go, but TI usually did it for me :)

    Regarding Turbo Imploder, I've been looking into doing a PC version of that as it offers nice compression and, more importantly, in-place decompression - something you don't get with, for example, BBE or MegaLZ. Maybe I'll not bother to complete it now that I see Gasman has done Chrust, but hey you never know.
  • LCDLCD
    edited April 2008
    Please don't use Turbo Imploder, or if you use it, VERIFY anything you compressed with it. I noticed that the decompressed code can be sometime corrupted. I personaly prefer PKLite on Spectrum.
  • edited April 2008
    LCD wrote: »
    Please don't use Turbo Imploder, or if you use it, VERIFY anything you compressed with it. I noticed that the decompressed code can be sometime corrupted. I personaly prefer PKLite on Spectrum.
    I've never had issue with TI. Both packers are using identical compression routines and both are coming from the same author (Saposoft). Nevertheless, I prefer PKLite due to more options with compression.

    TI is packing by default shrink and then imploder, while PKLite can pack shring only, imploder only, shrink + imploder, 2ximploder and 3ximploder. I have somewhere on my disk a modified version where the imploder's look-up window is configurable.

    Only if anyone interested, compression routine comes from CharPress by CharSoft (Brno, Czech Republic:)). This routine was ripped and used in TI, Tompacker and also PKLite.
  • edited May 2008
    omega wrote: »
    I've never had issue with TI. Both packers are using identical compression routines and both are coming from the same author (Saposoft). Nevertheless, I prefer PKLite due to more options with compression.

    Yes, TI is very effective and it's the only packer I use. It beats PKLITE and PKHUFF in some cases.
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