Arc 6.02 ST. What? Another Arc program for the ST? Although the ST world has been using ARC 5.21 (and all it's siblings) for quite some time now, the original ARC program written for the IBM PC has marched on to version 6.02. Not much has changed in the actual operation of ARC. The most notable feature that people will most likely use is the ability to automatically archive whole directory trees, and the files therein, rather than just arc files together. This will make the distribution of programs that use directories, that much easier. (I always found the 'extract all internal arc files to a folder with the same base name' to be a nuisance...) The most appreciated feature (I feel) is that over all speed is very much improved. I have spent quite a bit of time hand optimizing assembly code to the decompression routines built into this release of arc. Archiving to and from floppy disks should be much faster. This version of ARC allocates its buffers at run time, trying to allocate 63,488 byte buffers initially, and dropping in size all the way down to 2,048 byte buffers if memory is scarce. Arc will try to make the most efficient use of available memory. The most complained about feature will be the lack of a Squash (or 13 bit code lzw compression without pre run length encoding if you want to be technical) COMPRESSION. I seriously debated the idea of adding it back in (SEA the developers of arc never included it), but decided that exact compatibility with the PC version of ARC was important. ARC 6.02 ST can still EXTRACT Squashed files, just not create them. If it is that important to have Squash, then use ARC 5.21. I think you'll appreciate the difference in speed between this version of arc and any other version (including the recently released ARC 521C). If you have ANY questions, comments, or ??? you may get in contact with me at the following: Darin Wayrynen 10851 N 43rd Ave #211 Phoenix, AZ 85029 Next Gen BBS (602) 938-8288 I am more than willing to accept suggestions on how to improve this program in any way. I have included part of the original PC arc manual to help explain some of the more esoteric features of arc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: At the last minute, I dropped support for 'C'onverting old archives to the latest format. This feature is rarely used, and was holding up release of the program. I will add it back into the next release. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some people will be interested in the performance improvements over existing archives. I have included a short sample of compression and decompression times you may expect with this release of arc. ============================================= archive 1 text file 497825 bytes long: time filesize --------------------------------------------- arc 5.21B 4 min, 30 sec 104,304 bytes arc 5.21C 2 min, 6 sec 108,679 bytes arc 6.02ST 1 min, 26 sec 108,462 bytes 6.02 is 47% faster than 5.21C 6.02 is 215% faster than 5.21B ============================================= extract 1 text file from archive: arc size 104,304 bytes, file size 497,825 bytes time --------------------------------------------- arc 5.21B 1 min, 49 sec arc 5.21C 1 min, 28 sec arc 6.02ST 0 min, 34 sec 6.02 is 157% faster than 5.21C 6.02 is 219% faster than 5.21B ============================================= archive 60 binary (program) files totaling 495708 bytes time filesize --------------------------------------------- arc 5.21B 8 min, 8 sec 339,974 bytes arc 5.21C 4 min, 25 sec 343,251 bytes arc 6.02ST 3 min, 14 sec 340,750 bytes 6.02 is 36% faster than 5.21C 6.02 is 151% faster than 5.21B ============================================= extract 60 binary (program) files from archive: arc size 339,974 bytes, binary files totaled 495,708 bytes time --------------------------------------------- arc 5.21B 3 min, 12 sec arc 5.21C 2 min, 41 sec arc 6.02ST 1 min, 34 sec 6.02 is 71% faster than 5.21C 6.02 is 104% faster than 5.21B =============================================