• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

dos replacement for pkunzip that support FPU

soviet9922

soviet9922

Veteran Member
Joined
Jun 12, 2013
Messages
556
Location
Montevideo, Uruguay
Hi guys, here another one of my dumb questions but i was using the TDL menu and each time i run a game it unpacks it.
Theres any replacement for pkzip-pkunzip that uses an FPU to "run faster" ?, for 8088 or also even for a 386 ?.
 
There are a few recent compression programs that used floating point for no benefit. I am fairly sure that no compression code running on a 386 or earlier used floating point so x87 coprocessors won't help. There were specialized compression chips like the one from Stac but I don't know of any version of pkzip that would offload work to one of those.

Is there any method for decompressing all the files from TDL and keeping it that way? The second run shouldn't need anymore decompression time delay. I am not sure what TDL is so I don't know how it works.
 
Knowing how zip compression works, I doubt you can even gain 1% more speed by using the FPU. Compression is not encryption, there's not much maths done there, let alone floating-point maths. The only calculation-heavy part are the CRC32 hashes, which are created for every fine to ensure integrity.
 
FPU won't help with zip compression. May as well add in a stereo sound card.

There's no floating point in zip. It's all adds, shifts, and masking (since zip is a bitstream, not a byte stream). And an FPU doesn't do integer math any faster than the base CPU.
 
soviet9922 said:
Hi guys, here another one of my dumb questions but i was using the TDL menu and each time i run a game it unpacks it.
Theres any replacement for pkzip-pkunzip that uses an FPU to "run faster" ?, for 8088 or also even for a 386 ?.
Click to expand...

TDL author here. It should only unzip the first time; after that, it just launches out of the cache directory. If it's unzipping every single time, let me know.

One of the wish-list requests is a command-line option that can pre-unzip all your titles (something to run overnight, perhaps) as well as intelligent cache management. There is no ETA for those features at this time.

As others have stated, there is no way to speed up unzipping with a floating-point coprocessor. No floating-point math is involved in zip decompression.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top