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1995-02-27
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DeCrunchers - English Manual
MOTIVATION
Decrunch this old cool demos wasting their time in your overloaded disk-box
and rip the music, gfx and mybe the code from them, even on an Amiga with
Kick 2.04 and 68020 or more...
DISCLAIMER
The author cannot be held liable for the suitability or accuracy of this
manual and/or the program(s) it describes. Any damage directly or
indirectly caused by the use or misuse of this manual and/or the program it
describes is the sole responsibility of the user her/him self.
NAMES
DeBytekiller
DeTetragon
SYNOPSIS
DeBytekiller <filename/s>
DeTetragon <filename/s>
DESCRIPTION
DeBytekiller and DeTetragon are command line decruncher utilities
especially designed for use with file manipulating gui tools as SID,
Directory Opus or anything similar that is able to understand file-classes.
But they can of course also be used in a normal shell-environment. They
were made to enable you to decrunch programs (usually demos) that are
crunched with the Bytekiller V2.0 cruncher or the Tetragon Cruncher
V2.2(norm). Programs crunched by this tools depend on absolute addresses
and are in no way designed to work well on a multitasking enviroment such
as the amiga-operating system is. It is quite dangerous to start this
programs on any Amiga-Workbench driven system and not to get in serious
trouble with system-shutdowns, because of the illegal absolute
mem-adressing used by the decruncher. So I decided to write a tool which
decrunches these files in a safe way, to get them back in raw-format. This
is e.g. useful for people who want to rip music-mod files or gfx from
these programs, or just to read the long scroll texts of demos to the end.
WARNING
This programs are in no way designed to violate the rights of any kind of
copyrighted software. Be careful with the use of this tools on any kind of
soft where you expect to give parts of the developed raw file to anybody
else. Usually demos aren`t copyrighted in this way, but it could offend
the people who worked hours and hours on this treasures if you will send
the modules, gfx and maybe the resourced code of their software through the
world. I (the programer of this tools) could in no way be made responsible
for the misuse of this tools!
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
DeBytekiller and DeTetragon will run on any Amiga system with at least
512KB RAM , one diskdrive and OS 2.04. But if you want to decrunch bigger
files it is responsible to have more memory, because the source and the
destination must be held together in the mem while decrunching. Due to
modifications to the decrunch routines it is even possible to run the tools
on any processor platform, where the original routine fails. They were
tested on an A500, A3000 and A4000/40 without any problems occurring.
USAGE
From shell:
Select the file you want to decrunch by snooping through it with a file
examiner tool or try it simply out. Make sure you have enough space on the
device where the the file xxx to decrunch is stored, because the tools will
store the raw data in the same directory with the extension xxx.raw. If
xxx.raw already exists, you will get an error-message and nothing will be
stored.
From other gui-driven directory-tools:
This depends heavily on the tools you use. But I think there will be no
difficulties to develop a file class for autodetecting Bytekiller V2.0 and
Tetragon V2.2n crunched files, if you are experienced with using this
tools. A look in the source code will help, if you want to know the
characteristics of the filetypes.
KNOWN DIFFICULTIES
The filetype checking especially of the DeBytekiller tool is not that
perfect as it could be, because of lacking of too much characteristic bytes
in the decrunch header. So it could be that the decruncher will know a
file as a Bytekiller crunched file where there isn`t one. But that didn`t
happen to me while I am decrunching more than 100 old demos, but maybe it
could be....
FUTURE MOTIVATION
If you think there exists interest in the support of multitasking friendly
decrunchers for other "famous" absolute-adress based crunchers used by the
demo-scene, or if you recognize any difficulties by the use of this little
tools, then you should contact me as soon as possible. Maybe, I decide to
write a file recognizing tool that automatically decrunches files with
known filetypes.
HISTORY
DeBytekiller 1.0
DeTetragon 1.0
- first and hopefully last public Release
COPYRIGHT
DeBytekiller and DeTetragon are Copyright 1993 by Jürgen Lang. All rights
reserved. These programs are FREEWARE, so no financial donations are
required (but welcome). These programs may be freely distributed as long
as all documentation and executable(s) remain unchanged and are included
with the distribution. Also no profit is to be made by selling these
programs. They must not be added to other PD-libraries than AmigaLibDisks
from Fred Fish without my written permission. The price must not exceed
the costs of disk, package and mailing.
NOTES
Directory Opus is copyright by INOVATRONICS and Jonathan Potter
SID is copyright by Timm Martin
SAS is copyright by SAS Institute, Inc, Cary, NC
Bug reports, suggestions, postcards, flames, criticism, contributions,
ideas, gifts, etc., etc., etc........... go to the author!
AUTHOR
Jürgen Lang
Hinter der Mühle 4
6107-Reinheim 1
InterNet: chess@rbhp57.rgb.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
FidoNet: Jürgen Lang@2:247/4.8