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Multi-CD Magazin 1994 April
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MultiCDMagazin0494.iso01.iso
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1992-07-29
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The following items are new, changed, or fixed from version 1.14
of PKLITE in this release of version 1.15 of the PKLITE software.
Shareware version:
- Changed method of detecting when executable files are compressed.
Professional version:
- Same changes as above.
- Corrected an anomoly in the extra compression option that would compress
files with appended data (overlays) incorrectly.
The following items are new, changed, or fixed from version 1.13
of PKLITE in this release of version 1.14 of the PKLITE software.
Shareware version:
- On rare occasions with certain executables the PKLITE 1.13
extractor may set the stack to collide with the extractor code.
This has been fixed with version 1.14.
- The following file names will not be compressed and must be
renamed if you wish to compress them:
COMMAND.COM
SETVER.EXE
- PKLITE will now compress EXE files with up to approximately
32,000 relocations. Earlier versions were limited to about
15,000 relocations.
- Occasionally an incorrect 'Read-Only, skipping file' message
would occur when the file is not read only. This has been
fixed.
- The output path specified when compressing files to another directory
may now have a trailing slash or backslash.
- Added code to prevent a file being compressed from overwriting itself
when specifying an output path.
Professional version:
- Same changes as above.
- A minor anamoly in the relocation code for files compressed with
the extra compression option has been corrected.
- Changes have been made to make this version more resistant to
"disliting".
- The extra compression option now writes the characters 'PK'
(50, 4B hex) into the psp at offset 5C hex. The user program
can check for this signature and abort if it isn't found. This
way the user program will not run if the PKLITE compression is
removed. This check may look something like the following in
Microsoft or Borland C:
if (*(unsigned int far *)MK_FP(_psp, 0x5C) != 0x4B50)
exit(1);
The following items are new, changed, or fixed from version 1.12
of PKLITE in this release of version 1.13 of the PKLITE software.
- Fixed a minor anomoly when run on a POQET computer with power
management enabled.
The following items are new, changed, or fixed from version 1.05
of PKLITE in this release of version 1.12 of the PKLITE software.
- Fixed minor anomolies with some unusual .EXE files.
- Added a relocation item to the .EXE header so that DR-DOS and
MS-DOS 5.00 can load PKLITE'd files below 64K.
- Updated CHK4LITE to recognize 1.12 compressed files.
- Added a test for relocation table optimization and automatic header
optimization into PKLITE. PKLITE 1.12 tests the relocation table to
see if it can be optimized for better compression and asks if you want
to re-arrange the relocation header for better compression. This
performs the same operation as running HDROPT and then PKLITE. NOTE:
if the file is re-exapanded with PKLITE -x, it will not match the
original, but rather what the original .EXE file would be after
running HDROPT on it.
HDROPT
Files compressed with LZEXE and extracted with UNLZEXE and then
compressed with PKLITE sometimes compress bigger than if the original
.EXE file was compressed.
This is because UNLZEXE does not restore the .EXE file exactly as the
original file (unlike PKLITE, which does). Specifically, UNLZEXE
writes the .EXE relocation header in an unoptimal, non- canonical
form. The HDROPT program included in this version can be used to
normalize the .EXE relocation data and allow PKLITE to compress
UNLZEXE'd files much smaller.
HDROPT optimizes a file's .EXE relocation header storing each header
in a normalized canonical from, yielding much better compression with
PKLITE. While most popular compilers/linkers usually write the
relocation entries in canonical form when creating .EXE files, HDROPT
is useful for files created by UNLZEXE and perhaps other linkers that
create un-normalized relocation headers.
Also, when compressing some .EXE files, especially produced in a
development environment with DEBUGGING options enabled, some people
have reported that LZEXE compresses smaller than PKLITE. This is
because LZEXE automatically strips any debug data from an executable
file when compressing it. PKLITE only strips this data when the -r
option is used. In almost every single case, PKLITE with the -r
option should compress better than LZEXE when debugging data is
present in an .EXE file.
CHK4LITE
CHK4LITE can be used to determine if a file has been compressed with
PKLITE. CHK4LITE returns an errorlevel of 0 (zero) if none of the
file(s) scanned was compressed with PKLITE, 1 (one) if at least one
file was compressed with PKLITE and 2 (two) if at least one file was
compressed with the extra option in PKLITE Professional. If both
types of compressed files are scanned, CHK4LITE will return two.