Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!braner From: braner@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Moshe Braner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: Looking for way to compress a whole floppy Summary: Here's a recipe but you need a kitchen Message-ID: <6946@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 5 Dec 88 18:06:58 GMT References: <1926@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> Reply-To: braner@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Moshe Braner) Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY Lines: 29 [] I don't know of a program that will do it for you as-is, but should be easy to write one along these lines: (The actual program can be shorter than this description!) 1) load the whole floppy into RAM as one block, using one call to Rwabs(). (First get the block of RAM using the TOS Malloc() call, NOT the C compiler's malloc()...) 2) save that block into a file on your hard disk using one call to the TOS function Fwrite() (preceded, of course, by Fopen, etc). 3) (later, outside that program:) run ARC on that file to compress it, and upload. (The 360K should be compressed down to 180K or better.) Optimization: write the files to a freshly formatted floppy, to make sure the files are not fragmented and there are no "holes". Then make the program find out which is the last data sector actually used on the floppy, and only copy up to that sector. You can find code to do that in my program FLEXCOPY. Note: to make sure everybody can get it and like it, use a STANDARD TOS formatted floppy disk to start with. Also you may want to use a single-sided floppy since some poor souls out there are still stuck with those obsolete SS drives :-) - Moshe Braner