dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett) (12/03/90)
In article <1990Dec2.015832.10177@hub.cs.jmu.edu> bayers@hub.cs.jmu.edu (brian ayers) writes: >What's wrong with arc 602? It is so automatic it isn't even funny. >It will create the needed subdirectories "anchored" in the current >directory without any extra commands, just: "arc x arcname", >quite a far call from zoo, and it's archives are more compact than >zoo's too from the tests that I've done. Well, I was afraid that most people would have old versions of ARC that could not unpack archives made with arc 602. I spent about 5 hours trying to find the best way to archive the game (remember, it's 700K+ of data and it must be unpackable on single-sided drive systems with 1 meg), and came up with the following: I took the data and made two .LZH files (one for disk1 and one for disk2), then converted them to self-extracting LZH archives. (Thanks to Todd Miller for that suggestion.) Then I archived those two self-extracting archives into an LZH file, along with a short doc file explaining that DISK1.TOS and DISK2.TOS are in fact self-extracting. I think this is probably the best approach because: a) It's very hard to mess up the unpacking. (In particular, no problems are caused by the desktop upper-casing all the command line args.) b) It works on a single-sided drive (i.e., no hard drive) machine with a 600K RAMdisk. c) LZH compresses far better than ZOO or ARC (at least the versions I have). The .ZOO file was 335K while the .LZH file is only 255K. The ARC file was over 300K too. d) LZH files unpack faster than ARC and ZOO files. e) You don't even need an .LZH unpacker that knows about subdirectories, since the subdir archives are self-extracting. Even the most primitive LZH unpacker should be suitable. You can get all the tools you need to do this from atari.archive.umich.edu. The Lharc and SFX (self-extracting archive) utilities are all in atari/archivers. (SFX is by Stefan Gross and is really great -- try it!) Hope this saves others some work... Dave Baggett dmb%wam.umd.edu@uunet.uu.net