Humm .. well .. nothing much to say yet .. the whole idea behind
this packer is to make executable files (especially small ones) as small as possible
(hence the slogan)..
Exe-packers like LZEXE are ok for small files .. but the depacker takes up 330 bytes...
WWPACK is great for medium and large files because its compression is great ;) .. but
_at_least_ 380 bytes for a depacker is way too much for 4k intros and BBS-intros (IMHO
;)..
The depacker in aPACK is between 133 and 340 bytes long (depending on the input file). I
have put a lot of work into making it as small as possible.
Compression ratio is mostly better than UPX and
WWPACK (I have no files where they win,
but who knows - if you want your file to be as small as possible, try them all :) Check
out the following chart (if you find an error, or you think I have left out a good packer,
or you don't want your packer here - tell me.
aPACK uses its own version of the LZ algorithm with 56k - 60k
lookback and lazy-matching. Tag-bits are inserted in the data to distinguish literal bytes
from code-pairs. Code-pairs are encoded using my own version of Gamma-encoding.