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t.packmeister
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2022-08-26
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BYTES: P A C K M E I S T E R
Program and Text by Jeff Jones
[DAVE'S RAVE:] I used PACKMEISTER and
DTEXT to tighten up the Super LOADSTAR
Library (on Side 4) -- and thought you
might like having these tools easily
available.
PACKMEISTER is LOADSTAR's prefered
method of packing text. Anyone
creating disks for use with STAR
LOADER or DTEXT (on this issue) can
now flawlessly batch process "t."
files.
The center of this incarnation is
Gene Barker's (MADMAN SOFTWARE)
packing algorithm. I had to give you
an easy way to pack your EDSTAR files
rather than some quick and dirty
interface.
USING PACKMEISTER
{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}
This is a straightforward
utilitarian procedure. Select the
mode of operation: do you want to
pack t.files or unpack p.files? By
the way, your files [must] be named
with those prefixes, and must be PRG
files.
If you have a ton of files that
need to be renamed with t.prefixes,
you can use DISK SWEEPER, by me,
published on LOADSTAR #97. It'll
batch rename, adding prefixes or
removing suffixes.
PACKMEISTER will pack an EDSTAR
file, or any legal text file into a
"p." file. These files can be BLOADed
using the DTEXT utility (found on this
issue). DTEXT will BLOAD and
decompress the file into any area of
memory you want. You can then use
Mr.Mouse's RACK command to turn the
file into a virtual string array.
Just BLOAD the proper DTEXT
routine, and:
SYSaddr,"file",device,location
where [location] is the address where
you want to LOAD the packed file.
Remember, the packed file won't be
packed once it's LOADed.
The packing algorithm doesn't
use any variable space, and is pretty
fast. We could have used LZS
compression, but that would consume
24K of variable space, which may crowd
your program. The cost of using no
variable space is that some characters
are illegal.
1-12 are illegal
96-192 are illegal
220-246 are illegal
The following characters are
exceptions, and are allowed, since you
might want to draw nice boxes:
146, 163, 171, 173, 174, 176, 177,
178, 179, 189, 192, 221
These are the CMDR-qweraszx,
and other characters used in drawing
boxes, like SHIFT-PLUS.
The program automatically remaps
SHIFT SPACEs into SPACEs, as well as
some of the box characters that are
duplicated (such as 171 and 235).
NOTE: 1581/CMD users, this feature
will batch process up to 256 files. If
you have a directory with more than
256 t. or p.files in it -- you
SHOULDN'T -- copy the files you want
to work with to another disk. Note
that the requestor looks at t.files
and p.files exclusively, so you can
have the directory filled with other
things. And since it looks at the
t.files and p.files separately, you
won't have to worry about keeping
packed and text files on the same
disk.
JJ