Would be be possible to implement a file compression/decompression in DCS or is the app already bursting at the seams? I made an Axe program a couple years ago which did a RLE pass followed by Huffman coding and was pretty impressed by the results, usually a 2-3 compression ratio on common programs such as mario. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly, but the compiled compressor was 1-2KB and the decoder was smaller, <1KB, so I'd imagine in assembly both subroutines could be written in a total of 1K or less.

I never made an interface for it because I'd be duplicating a lot of features of other shells and the best use case would be automatic decoding/encoding upon read/write to flash memory anyway. And I found that I didn't have enough ram for both the encoder and large files, so I had to move the encoder to an 16KB app, which kind of defeats the purpose.

I think a shell like DCS would be the perfect place to put these features that I couldn't implement in Axe. Alternatively, someone could implement a higher-order program (on a computer) that takes an 8xp file as input and outputs the corresponding self-extracting program. If the second option is feasible it's probably better as it's universal and more powerful, but I don't know where the program could find space to extract itself on the calculator. (Maybe someone with more knowledge of TI-84+ hardware can help me out)
An on-calc compressor for BASIC programs would be amazing! We already have ConvHex for computers that will compress ASM programs. Neat idea, though how will we be able to edit the programs after they are compressed? Will DCS have to uncompress it every time? Smile
That's beautiful! I can't believe I didn't find ConvHex earlier.

The idea was to add automatic compress/decompress as a hook to writing/reading from flash. I think DCS already unarchives things automatically before running or editing so yes, it would have to uncompress BASIC programs every time which might be annoying. Of course there would be a flag to turn it off if this was implemented.

However I think even having manual non-executable zip functionality in DCS would be amazing, since the TI-OS "groups" does nothing.
  
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