Posted By
icbrkr
on 2016-09-23
20:06:38
|  Plus/4 Zipcoder
I've posted this just about everywhere, so sorry if you already read this before.
Anyone up for some coding? I'm a frequent user of Plus/4 and 16 stuff, and I have quite a few people grabbing Plus/4 and 16 files from the BBS. Just like on the C64, the full disk games and mags and whatever are in zipcode format - but there isn't a zipcode depacker for the Plus/4 which I suppose is because the Plus/4 scene never really depended on modems. So this is what I'm looking for - someone to convert, write, etc, a zipdecoder for the Plus/4 (and possibly the 128).
Here's some sample code and format explanations.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/557wkznijn6gbk7/zip2diskc.txt?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ugfelridptqewj/zipcodeexplanation.txt?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bsb6szjwqm6j7to/zipcodepascal.txt?dl=0
I did manage to write this in BASIC, but it's not worth it. It's so seriously slow calling up disk routines.
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Posted By
MMS
on 2016-09-23
22:19:37
 | Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
Hi, did you try Austropeed compiler on your BASIC program ? It makes things typically several times faster, though it will not speed up the drive itself, I think calling up the routines will become faster.
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Posted By
icbrkr
on 2016-09-23
22:46:01
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
I did, but it didn't help much. I was hoping it would replace my BASIC with straight KERNAL commands but no such luck. I rewrote the routines in ML as best as I could, but I could never get them to work quite right. So at this point, I'm looking for someone smarter than me 
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Posted By
JamesD
on 2016-09-23
23:15:16
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
From what I just read, unpacking is normally slow on the machine.
There is some C source code here. That should be easier to build than the Pascal:
http://markus.brenner.de/
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-09-24
02:28:02
 | Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
icbrkr I've uploaded The Lands Of Zador on Particles! just few days ago, using the classic zip I use for C64 too. In the past, the US sceners used to transfer disks in the classic SDA format, and that's why we still preserve several US games as SDF (that's the same as SDA).
Probably we've never feel the need just because zipcode packers/depackers just worked for any Commodore disk if required.
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Posted By
icbrkr
on 2016-09-24
09:14:57
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
Interesting. I guess SDA is because most Plus/4 releases didn't have a whole lot of releases that required a track and sector copy? (I'm assuming SDA is self-dissolving-archive). Is there an archiver for SDA on the Plus/4?
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-09-24
09:23:16
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
Heh, I've searched for the tool by BushRat, and I've spotted Lynx Compiler / Lynx Decompiler, but no sign of the tool he used to archive games like Aces Up :/
Anyway, I'm quite sure it's somewhere into the D64 Recall software archive...
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Posted By
icbrkr
on 2016-09-24
09:30:36
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
I guess using .LNX would work - it's a standard format across all the Commodore 8 bits. I just remember back in the day it used to give me headaches all the time when XMODEM padding would cause the file to change just enough to where if a byte was changed it wouldn't decompress
Thanks for the help. The ultimate goal was to not have to rely on another 8 bit to download/decompress files. I didn't take into consideration that most releases could be file copied. I was used to anything being a full disk release having to be zipped because of track/sector/non-standard DOS files.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-09-24
09:33:49
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
No probs at all: as you've seen, I uploaded The Lands Of Zador disk as classic 4 part split zipcode 
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Posted By
icbrkr
on 2016-09-24
10:51:05
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
.. and thanks for that
On another topic. I hadn't see the D64 Recall collection before.. thanks for mentioning it! You've given me something to do today.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-09-26
10:54:52
| Re: Plus/4 Zipcoder
In the last days, I've spent some spare time to give another round to search missing software into the archives (a little retainer has been uploaded some days before, just like Endzone +4 which looks like the original release), and at the moment the /stuff folder contains a couple of dozens stuff to add later. Among those, I've spotted the SDF archiver too
EDIT: all the SDF and SDA stuff is up now.
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