STONE CRACKER v2.99 - We Fixed It Thank you for your interest to StoneCracker crunchers. Firts of all I hope you remembered to copy the cruncher itself, doc files and the decruncher source code. Please try to spread them together. Stc is a Public Domain program mainly for demomaker etc. users purposes. It is quite common within these users to program into absolute memory locations which surely has some advantages. Because I'm a part of that user group I developed an 'absolute address - non system - demo cruncher'. There is a good reason for this update (that should never see the daylight). Although the Stc v2.92 - Final Step was ment to be the end of Stc family it is not. You see, it was quite BUGGED. When I tested the cruncher I never met a program that would not have worked. Actually there were not any crunching bugs at all but I noticed that too many programmer use over 64kb long work areas within their programs (I wonder why). This forced me to update the Stc because the cruncher/decruncher couldn't handle areas longer than 64kb (the limitation of DBF-loops!). Now this thing has been fixed. There are probably several satisfied users using Stc v2.92 that have not faced any problems so I decided not to change the algorithm. Only few things have been improved in decruncher (2 bytes shorter now, heh) and during crunching process. Now read the old doc file for Stc v2.92 if you want to know how this cruncher works. The old doc file should be with this package too. Improvements that were added to Stc v2.99! IMPORTANT! Read this! 1. Now it is possible to define the whole Status Register including the flags! 2. Decruncher is now $ee (=#238) bytes long. Too much work for 2 bytes! 3. No limitations in the crunched data! 4. Max equal lenght... If you know that your program includes a lot of same data e.g 157kb of zeroes (silly I say) you can define Max equal lenght e.g to #100000 bytes. This option will now speed up crunching dramatically when the cruncher examines earlier mentioned empty area. Normally press Enter and the default value is set to $ffffffff. This is a bit hard to explain but probably you figure it out yourself. 5. HUNK RELOCATOR! Well, the cruncher examines the file that you want to crunch. If it looks like a relocatible file (like cli commands, all legal programs etc.) the cruncher asks you into what address you want to fix the program. You can skip the relocation simply pressing the Enter. B'cos there was awful little information around about several hunk types I can't quarantee 100% workability for the relocator. Anyway I tested it with quite many programs and it seemed to work ok. The relocator understands these hunk types: Hunk_Code, Hunk_Data, Hunk_Bss, Hunk_Reloc32, Hunk_Reloc16 and of course Hunk_End & Hunk_Header. Hunk_Symbol and Hunk_Debug will be removed if there are any. 6. Simple speedup buffer that speeds crunching with a couple of minutes! ONLY! 7. Better default values. Here's a list of all default values that can be chosen by pressing Enter: ·MegaCrunch - default: N=no megacrunch (·Turn the mem.exp. off - default: N=don't turn off) ·Fix to: $ - default: No Fixing ·Efficiency - default: 2=#2048 bytes ·Max equal lenght - default: $ffffffff bytes (=no shortcut) ·Save executable or data - default: E=save executable file ·Decruncher type - default: N=normal decruncher ·Decruncher location: $ - default: $100 ·Jump to: $ - default: same as start address ·Save again - default: Y=save again ·Crunch more - default: Y=crunch more files Before I leave you I have some words to say. If there is any coder who wants to chat with me about clock cycles etc. stuff please write to me (address is at the end of this textfile). I'm not so swap-style person so my stuff is always old and DELAYED! As you should know the life isn't for computers. That's why I stopped serious democoding a year ago. But I'm still inspirated enough to keep messing around and even program something when I have time (huh! twice a week is enough). So this was the thing I wanted to say. Next coming ProPacker for ProTracker modules and probably some lame intros. Wait for my ProPacker b'cos it will be really efficient (I hope so). Bye! Mr.Spiv of Cave (no need to write this) Jouni Korhonen Hiihtomajantie 11120 Riihimaki FINLAND MOVEQ #0,D0 ;succeful exit RTS ;bye