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From: det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: WANTED: News compression information...
Message-ID: <1990May30.200519.12409@hawkmoon.MN.ORG>
Date: 30 May 90 20:05:19 GMT
Organization: Home System (One of the Eternal Champions)
Lines: 26

In article <1990May29.202056.26271@ox.com> time@ox.com (Tim Endres) writes:
> 
> I am working on an implementation of News for the lowly Macintosh.
> I have had many requests to support compressed/batched news.
> I have easily added the support for batched news, but have found
> the support of compressed news to be a dilemma.
> 
> Most people have indicated that "compress", the PD version, is what
> is normally used for news compression. This would *seem* fine, but
> the darn thing requires 500K RAM just to uncompress. This not only
> seems extraordinary, but I can not see how implementations on a PC
> limited to 640K could even work.

We ran into the same problem with PCnews -- compress is just too big to run
effectively in the (limited) pc environment.  So, we found a pd program called
"u16" (i can send it to you if you like), which does nothing but uncompress, is
written in assembly and is optomized for space.  We are therefore able to
support standard 16-bit and 12-bit newsfeeds on the ibm pc with this program.
It still wasn't easy wedging it in though but it worked!  Unfortunately, this
program may not work on a mac (probably doesn't since it is written at least
partly, i believe, in 8086 code.  But, the original authors may have a 68k
version as well or perhaps you can port the assembly version of it.

derek
-- 
Derek Terveer		det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG