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In 1994 PC Zone had a problem. They had already produced a CD-Rom master of their featured cover game "System Shock" but neither they nor the game's publisher, Electronic Arts, could reduce the 3.5" floppy version to less then three diskettes. What was infuriating them was that they were only using about 15-20% of the third disk and really wanted to save the large amount of money that duplicating the third disk would cost.
By this time I had gained a bit of a reputation as a Cover Disk Editor for being able to cram the maximum amount of software onto a floppy disk, so they gave me a call. I told them I would try, but I didn't have much hope myself as game company programmers normally do data compression very well. However, I discovered that in this case the executable files had not been packed, so that saved a bit of space, and then recompressing the data using various different algorithms (zip, lzh, arj etc) I was able to find the perfect combination that achieved the maximum compression for each file.
Fortunately I managed to just scrape in with a couple of Kilobytes to spare, which was doubly good for me seeing as I wasn't going to get paid unless I succeeded! |
