UHARC Wrapper v1.0

coded April 2000 by Decline [LAXiTY]

1. Introduction

With games growing bigger and bigger, it's harder for game groups to hit the faction disk limit (though it has recently been raised) and new more poweful compression technologies than good old Ace/Zip are required. A compressor used in some recent releases is UHARC, one of the best compressors available today. Unfortunately UHARC is a 32 bit DOS program and does not support long filenames. Groups fixed this problem by archiving everything without compression in an archive and then let UHARC run over it, but this has some major disadvantages:

- decompression time is quite slow, because several passes are required to restore original data

- compression is not as good as UHARC can do, because UHARC sorts files according to their postfix, to get similar files into one compression window

- decompression requires lots of additional diskspace

After being totally pissed off from installing NFS5 and Messiah, i decided to solve this problem, and I developed the UHARC wrapper. The wrapper first converts filenames to 8.3 (DOS format) compliant filenames, archives them with UHARC and creates an index-file to restore the original names. The unwrapper can reverse this process. Instead of running UHARC and then renaming and moving all files, it lurks in the background, waits until a file is extracted and then takes care of it. This is quite fast and saves lots of disk space. The wrapper leaves file extensions unchanged as far as possible to enable optimal compression.

2. Wrapping

UHARCW.EXE TargetScript AddFolder

TargetScript is the filename of a textfile containing the original filenames. The UHARC archive will automatically named 'wrapped.uha'. The Add Folder is the location of the files to be added to the archive. All subfolders and files within will recursively added. UHARC.EXE needs to be in the current folder to enable wrapping.

2. Unwrapping

UHARCU.EXE TargetScript [OutFolder]

Make sure, that TargetScript, UHARC.EXE and 'wrapped.uha' are in the current folder. The OutFolder is optional.

2. Problems

Due to the fact, that UHARC.EXE is a dos application, it's window won't close automatically unless, you create a pif file for it.

I found no other problems so far.

2. Final Words

I hope, release groups will use this wrapper (or their own) for bigger releases. It's just 6k overhead involved and saves so much time and space on decompressing a release. If you use the unwrapper in your release, just credit me, and it's ok.

-04/03/2000 - Decline [LAXiTY].