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cba
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 933 |
History of Crunchers & Packers
I am very curious what crackers from back in the day used for crunching or packing their releases.
Self made ones I can only assume. Are any of them available here at csdb ?
I am talking about the very first ones like :
1103
ABC Crackings
Mr.Z
The period before 1986 , so before the Card Cruncher from the 1001 crew
Anyone here who knows more about this ? |
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tlr
Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 1717 |
Are we talking just equal sequence style crunchers here?
Most "early" releases used char packers only (if packed at all).
Things like Compactor/Linker V3.10 and numerous other undated packers.
Search for Compactor/Compacker/Packer/Cruncher/Shorter/Linker...
Maxshorter and The Final Super-Compressor were probably the first sequence crunchers I used.
When was the first card cruncher then?
The earliest card cruncher in csdb is Card Cruncher V4 from may 1987 which is roughly the same time as Matcham Time Cruncher V3.1 was leaked IIRC.
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cba
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 933 |
I just checked several ABC & 1103 cracks, and most of them seem not be packed / crunched at all.
I think the first Card Cruncher was probably released back in 1986...
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Graham
Account closed
Registered: Dec 2002
Posts: 990 |
It started when crackers would start to write copy routines to skip large ateas of empty memory. Then somebody must have had the idea for that packbyte based RLE. He probably didn't know about packing algos, otherwise he had programmed the standard RLE algo. Some old packers also used a packnibble and 12 bits pack range instead of only 8 bit.
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The Shadow
Registered: Oct 2007
Posts: 304 |
Matcham was the first to create the cruncher. All crunchers evolved from Time Crunch. Galleon studied the style of programming from Matcham and created the Cruel Cruncher. Darkforce studied thoroughly the design of the Time Cruncher 3 and created the Darksqueezer. The original creator of the Kompress Master cartridge may be forgotten. Kompress Master was the most powerful cruncher used in the 80's and considering it was able to defeat Darksqueezer 2.2 and Cruel Cruncher 3.0, it likely is equal to the Exomizer. |
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SIDWAVE
Account closed
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2238 |
ABC has for sure used packers, and other groups of that time too, use The Compacker 2.0, german packer.
It gives the sysline "SYS(2080) THE FRIENDS.."
ECA linker wasnt really used as packer, although it is RLE.
In early days we linked with ECA, then crunched with compacker 2.0, until we got Timecruncher from Matcham, in 1987. TST was one of the lucky groups, that Matcham made a special version of timecruncher for. it was a status symbol to have displayed TST in the upper corner while uncrunching, coz people knew it was the 'magical' Timecruncher :)
1001 cardcruncher became very popular for those who didnt have the Timecruncher (it was a some have only tool), but cardcruncher was ripped from a cart, and spread like wildfire.
If you spread Timecruncher, it was a death sentence :) |
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tlr
Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 1717 |
Quote: Matcham was the first to create the cruncher. All crunchers evolved from Time Crunch. Galleon studied the style of programming from Matcham and created the Cruel Cruncher. Darkforce studied thoroughly the design of the Time Cruncher 3 and created the Darksqueezer. The original creator of the Kompress Master cartridge may be forgotten. Kompress Master was the most powerful cruncher used in the 80's and considering it was able to defeat Darksqueezer 2.2 and Cruel Cruncher 3.0, it likely is equal to the Exomizer.
This boils down to the definition of 'cruncher' which seems to have varied over time.
If we by this mean LZ77 style equal sequence packing plus (perhaps optionally) entropy coding, then time cruncher probably wasn't the first.
The above mentioned The Final Super-Compressor comes to mind, but there are probably others.
Does anybody know what the packing algorithm of things like File-Compactor III [dutch] and The Sledge Hammer V1.2 is?
Time Cruncher used a streamlined process doing both LZ77 + entropy coding in a single step which was a major leap forward.
Like you say, this became the main strategy used in later crunchers, many improved from a reverse engineered original implementation.
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Graham
Account closed
Registered: Dec 2002
Posts: 990 |
I remember using Super Compressor before Timecruncher and the others. (Btw, that (C) 1991 is a reference to TMC 1991 and not the year 1991, Super Compressor was a 1986 tool).
Using the Super Compressor was always an adventure. It would give you a rough estimation how long it will take which usually was in the range of 3 hours and if you needed to pack a file several times it could easily take you a day or two.
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algorithm
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 702 |
Does anyone know if there were any crunchers released which used other methods of compression (apart from the usual sequence/rle/huffman and the entropy mentioned in this forum subject? |
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chatGPZ
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11127 |
probably every method that exists (often without the authors knowing what exact method it is) |
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Richard
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 619 |
Wasn't Sledgehammer V1.2 originally called Sledger? |
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