[HN Gopher] FC8 - Faster 68K Decompression (2016)
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       FC8 - Faster 68K Decompression (2016)
        
       Author : electricant
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2024-04-28 15:58 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bigmessowires.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bigmessowires.com)
        
       | miohtama wrote:
       | In "faster than memcpy" series we have also Blosch for modern
       | CPUs
       | 
       | https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/
       | 
       | I have never been able to use Blosch myself. But it sounds really
       | interesting, outperforming RAM. Not sure what are the
       | applications - columnar data processing, Parquet files, etc?
        
         | thechao wrote:
         | Why doesn't BLOSC have a little chart comparing itself to LZ4,
         | Zstd, etc? Kinda like this:
         | 
         | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37614410/comparison-betw...
         | 
         | Because it seems like such a trivial chart to make.
        
         | jeramey wrote:
         | It gets used a fair amount in the weather data space.
         | Forecasting and climate reanalysis grids are typically large
         | (gigabytes) N-dimensional arrays of float32 values and Blosc
         | provides enough tunable knobs that it's fairly easy to find a
         | combination that performs acceptably without writing a bunch of
         | custom handling code to keep track of which underlying
         | compression schemes and settings were used. Additionally, it
         | supports byte- and bit-shuffling filters which can really help
         | boost the compressibility of certain data sets.
        
       | dansalvato wrote:
       | I'm working on a game for Amiga (another 68k-based platform) and
       | settled on ZX0 to decompress assets on the fly:
       | https://github.com/einar-saukas/ZX0
       | 
       | I was originally using LZ4, but I switched to ZX0 after learning
       | that it can do in-place decompression, which means I don't have
       | to allocate separate memory for the compressed data. I'm very
       | happy with the compression ratio, and decompression of large
       | assets (~48kb) only takes a few frames on a 7MHz 68000.
       | 
       | Also of note is LZ4W, included in Sega Genesis Dev Kit (and
       | discussed in the comments section of OP's article), a variant of
       | LZ4 that only uses word-aligned operations. That makes it much
       | faster on the 68000, which can struggle to efficiently handle
       | 8-bit data. More info here:
       | https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/blob/master/bin/lz4w.txt
        
         | bananaboy wrote:
         | Nice! When you say "on the fly" are you literally decompressing
         | assets from disk during gameplay? Can you do asynchronous IO on
         | the Amiga?
        
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