Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: looz-execute? (was Re: I have PC NetHack 2.3 working, will post) Message-ID: <2805@bsu-cs.UUCP> Date: 29 Apr 88 17:06:30 GMT References: <654@bms-at.UUCP> <5242@megaron.arizona.edu> <8322@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 28 In article <8322@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (RAMontante) writes: >>...Then can LOOZ execute a 373K .EXE file directly from >>the compressed .ZOO file? >The looz documentation states that the executable file must be not more >than 65535 bytes. > >Does anyone know if/where MSDOS source for looz and zoo might be? Typically, you don't save much time or space by keeping very large programs in compressed form, since uncompression then takes a while. So it seemed likely that the direct extract/execute feature of looz would only be useful for small programs. Having looz release all memory it took before transferring control to the extracted program requires quite a bit of memory gymnastics and multiple relocations. (It was an interesting debugging excercise.) Restricting the extracted program to a 64 K segment kept things simpler. You could blame the 8086 architecture that this was so. The source for MSDOS zoo isn't published yet, but will be, as soon as zoo 2.0 for UNIX gets published. I'm inclined to keep the looz source secret though, since it's fun having the only archiver in the world that does the direct uncompress/execute with no memory penalty, and publishing source might cause loss of this distinction. :-) -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: !{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi