Gunzip 1.1 for MSX released

Laurens Holst released gunzip 1.1, the high-performance gzip (.gz) archive decompressor. The highlight of this release is performance improvements, it’s now at least 2.5 times as fast as existing unarchiving utilities.

You can download it from the project page.

Improvements in this release:

• Performance optimisations: 35% faster.
• Added /f option to skip checksum validation. Use at your own risk!
• Improved performance on full disks.
• Reduced memory usage a bit.
• No empty file generated when header parsing fails.
• Fixed path parsing bug.

To put some numbers on the performance improvement relative to version 1.0, extracting a disk image of Aleste 2 now takes 87 seconds (-46s) on MSX2 and 18 seconds (-8s) on turboR. With the new option to disable checksum validation it inflates even faster, a mere 55s and 13s. But, use that option at your own risk!

Gunzip is open source and liberally licensed, so you can reuse the code in any way you want. Its deflate algorithm is also used by other file formats like zip and png. One great development based on the gunzip implementation is Louthrax’s SofaUnzip, and more projects are underway.

For more information, questions and technical discussions, visit the gunzip forum thread.

Thanks go to Wouter Vermaelen, Louthrax and bore for support and contributions to this release.

Relevant link: Gunzip for MSX