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FC8 – Faster 68K Decompression (2016)
fun! I’ve written a new compression scheme that’s designed to be as fast as possible to decompress on a 68K CPU, while still maintaining a decent compression density. I’m calling it FC8, and you can get the generic C implementation and optimized 68K decompressor from the project’s Github repository.
EOF eliminates the need to check the input pointer after decoding each token to determine if decompression is complete, and speeds things up slightly. My first attempt at FC8 had a minimum match size of 2 bytes instead of 3, which compressed about 0.7% smaller but was 13% slower to decompress due to the larger number of backrefs. At the other extreme, the introduction of a LIT token without any other changes resulted in the fastest decompression speed of all, about 7% faster than FC8, but the compressed files were about 6% larger, and I decided the tradeoff wasn’t worth it.
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