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Self Extracting [message #388971] Wed, 27 November 2019 07:12 Go to next message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Anthony Adverse

I know the GS has .sea, self extracting archives, was there ever an 8bit shrinkit equivalent?
Re: Self Extracting [message #388974 is a reply to message #388971] Wed, 27 November 2019 10:43 Go to previous message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: fadden

On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 4:12:09 AM UTC-8, Anthony Adverse wrote:
> I know the GS has .sea, self extracting archives, was there ever an 8bit shrinkit equivalent?

There was no self-extracting 8-bit ShrinkIt. Things were done a different way: files were sometimes posted as executable text files, which you would EXEC from DOS/ProDOS.

The file would start with a CALL -151 and then be followed by a series of monitor assignment statements ("01F0: A2 00 A0 10 A9 00 BD 00 20 E8 D0 FA"). This was known as "executioner" format. (They were created by a ProDOS program called EXECUTIONER; I assume the format was named after the program.)

Posting to Usenet could change the end-of-line character, so you had to fix that after downloading. There was no checksum or other way to verify that the file had been received correctly, so you wouldn't know if the file was truncated or had a chunk missing. IIRC it didn't handle splitting files into multiple parts, which was important because of article length limitations. The output was much larger than you'd get with base64 encoding. These issues were all addressed by BinSCII.

The problem with self-extracting 8-bit SYS programs is that they get loaded entirely into memory, which severely limits how much you can put in them. Self-extracting programs aren't all that useful... I don't think GSHK's self-extracting feature got used for much.
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