Originally posted by Reichart
Hello to all interested in this experiment (compression), and Coelacanth.
I'm the CTO at Prolific Publishing, Inc. I have been designing compression technology for about 20 years.
We are currently working on reducing the collective size of the Aquarium with installer to a size that would fit on a floppy (about 1.4 megs).
Consider something very simple. An image which is 640x480 and is 16 bit (32,000 colours plus mask) is 615K. What controls the compression size are many different factors. First, how complex the image is. In other words, how many "patterns" can be found in the image that can be removed, and replaced with tokens that represent that same data. The other thing is the willingness to reduce the quality. In the case of screen shots (User Inteface for example) you don't want to use lossy compression.
A compressor that does not know the nature of the data (such as WinZip) simply uses a blind compression technique such as LZ, or LZW, or Huffman.
Then there is audio. The Aquarium has a 500K audio file.
Then there is the program itself, which is a little over meg (containing all the images for all the fish, and the background).
30% savings is common for most blind compressors. My own technology will compress programs to about 50% of their original size. But we have not written our compressor for mass use.
We are days away from getting this thing squeezed to a nice small size that does not eat up all our bandwidth, and that allows people with slow modems to get the data quickly (our two big goals). Again consider that at 5 megs * 20K downloads a day = 100,000,000,000. You read it right! Every byte counts.
If you have questions about compression, you can email me directly. If you have general questions about the Aquarium please direct them on this forum, or to Service@SerneeScreen.com. Thanks
Reichart@Prolific.com
Did you take a look at this thread about a freeware script creator that someone dug up.
https://www.feldoncentral.com/forums...7&pagenumber=2
Using standard windows installer scripts it compiles small enough to fit on a floppy without spending payroll time to do it. I don't know if it does all you need but it adds and removes reg entries, is very versatile, etc.