Pletter 0.5b

A couple of days ago, Dutch MSX developers XL2s have uploaded a new version of their compression utility Pletter. With Pletter you can conveniently reduce the size of -for example- the graphics and music of your MSX software, and thus have either less storage requirements for your software, or simply have more content using the same space.

Relevant link: XL2s website

Comments (21)

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6832)

08-01-2008, 14:22

there is no "what's new" file...
what is the improvement wrt version 05a ?

By Yukio

Paragon (1540)

08-01-2008, 14:23

Cool!

By Huey

Prophet (2687)

08-01-2008, 15:23

What are the differences between the a and b version?

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (9950)

08-01-2008, 15:37

According to the pletter.txt

"The size of the lookbackbuffer is stored in the compressed data"

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6832)

08-01-2008, 15:41

this was already in 05a ....
what changes with 05b ?

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (9950)

08-01-2008, 15:47

well, beats me..

Let's assume that this new version can make strawberry tea.. wouldn't that be nice?

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6832)

08-01-2008, 15:59

Having recently moved from 04 to 05a, it would quite disappointing for me to know that 0.5b corrects some critical
problem of version 0.5a that could destroy all my data, corrupt my PC, install a bot performing an hacker attack to
same EU Institution, install illegal SW on my hard disk -it's a bot, not my fault- etc. etc.

By GhostwriterP

Hero (660)

10-01-2008, 19:22

All the bots and spyware are stil in it ofcourse

By nerlaska

Master (166)

11-01-2008, 08:20

Hello

I would like to know how to obtain the size of the unpacked data using your Platter 5b ASM code
Do I am obligated to save the length of the info in a header?
Thank you.

By Arjan

Paladin (765)

11-01-2008, 09:30

Bitbuster included that information, but the Pletter guy decided it wasn't useful so he removed it
The source code of Pletter is available, you could easily add that information yourself.
Or, if you don't need to know the original length before decompressing the data, you can still calculate it.

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6832)

11-01-2008, 10:35

I subscribe nerlaska's comment :

in pletter 0.5a it seems that there is no easy way to know the final size in advance from the compressed data (so I had to store/know the original size of the data)
I guess that pletter 0.5b has the same "feature"

(Actually I do not think that this is a big issue, but it is worth to ask if better ways exit)

BTW what is changed between 0.5a and 0.5b ?

By GhostwriterP

Hero (660)

11-01-2008, 19:07

I never needed to know the lenght in advange.
I just do the following:

  ld hl,source
  ld de,destination
  call pakuit
  ld hl,destination
  or a
  sbc hl,de

ARTRAG: Files get smaller (in most cases) with 0.5b

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6832)

11-01-2008, 19:57

You do not use C and malloc

I cannot just set destination to
the heap and hope

About 0.5a and 0.5b, are the de-packers
in asm the same or compatible ?

By [D-Tail]

Ascended (8258)

12-01-2008, 11:33

GhostwriterP: does that method work in DOS2 as well? If I recall correctly, DOS2 has some memory managing routines. Will the "call pakuit" behave nicely and only depack in free segments?

By GhostwriterP

Hero (660)

12-01-2008, 15:20

ARTRAG: 0.5a And 0.5b are fully compatible.

D-Tail: The unpacker is basically a LDIR instruction, what does dos2 memory management have to do with it?

By [D-Tail]

Ascended (8258)

14-01-2008, 16:09

First of all, I know nothing about Pletter's internal organs. I was assuming that, if the compressed data would be like 15kB in size, the data would exceed a memory segment size (16kB) when decompressed. Is this true? Or how does it work?

By GhostwriterP

Hero (660)

14-01-2008, 19:06

True, like I said LDIR (without the bc )

By Huey

Prophet (2687)

16-01-2008, 14:09

Does anyone have problems executing pletter.exe???
Version 5a is 96Kb but 5b is 24Kb (and gives an error)