[Coco] Where to get Ar2 for OS9

[L. Curtis Boyle]

Carl also release his earlier Ar 1.3, which only supported 11 bit LZW, and then 2.0 which added 12 bit support (and increased compression). (There were some intermediate hacks by others, including a 1.4 and 1.5, that also added 12 bit compression).


L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net

TRS-80 Color Computer Games website
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/coco_game_list.html



> On Jun 27, 2020, at 12:26 AM, Jeff Teunissen <deek at d2dc.net> wrote:
> 
> On OS-9, "Ar2" is called Ar.
> 
> Carl Kreider wrote our Ar based on ideas and source code found in the
> book _Software Tools_, by PJ Plauger and Brian W. Kernighan. Now,
> Brian Kernighan also wrote the original Unix ar, and a descendant of
> that program is still in wide use across the globe.
> 
> In keeping with the Unix philosophy, the Unix version of ar does only
> one thing -- it collects individual files into an archive that
> includes all of them, without doing any compression, etc. If you want
> to compress an archive, you do just that -- you use compress, gzip,
> etc. to turn your "foo.a" archive into the compressed archive
> "foo.a.Z" or "foo.a.gz". Carl's version is a little bit different, in
> that it has a different file format and supports a fairly simple
> Lempel-Ziv "LZ1" compression.
> 
> Anyway, our version of Ar is called Ar2 because otherwise it would
> conflict with the original Unix/Linux/etc. program of the same name.