> This morning I was under the shower and I was wondering what algorithm did the
> C64 packers use... it must be a very tiny thing (but that's not a great issue
> with 8bit instructions) able to decompress stuff in place (no disk swapping of
> course) and booted from the BASIC space maybe? But I vaguely recall the ,1
> parameter in LOAD"*",8,1 to be used to load directly executable code or
> something like that...
>
> Another suspect I had is that decompressing probably ended up eating the BASIC
> interpreter memory (was it copied to ram on boot? why those 38911 bytes free at
> startup otherwise?) and some video memory too maybe? There are a lot of games
> that throw trash on the screen once loaded, before starting... so I guess the
> video memory was shared.
>
> So, is it some kind of weird, quick and dirty algo? Or just a stripped down
> Huffman or LZ? Just out of curiosity.. I am still awed to see how many pirate
> intros with music and gfx fit, together with the game, in a 120-block file or so
> :P
>
> Thanks in advance :)
>
>