GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. Preamble The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too. When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software. Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow. GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION 0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you". Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does. 1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program. You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.) These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program. In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License. 3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable. If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code. 4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. 5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. 6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License. 7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program. If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances. It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice. This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License. 8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License. 9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation. 10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally. NO WARRANTY 11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. 12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms. To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found. Copyright (C) This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail. If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode: Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details. The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program. You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names: Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker. , 1 April 1989 Ty Coon, President of Vice This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License. Sources for Rose Shank, a 4k intro for Assembly 2007 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Intro by: Jere Sanisalo - http://www.xmunkki.org Jetro Lauha - http://jet.ro Source release and the IL4 compiler by: Jere Sanisalo - http://www.xmunkki.org Introduction -=-=-=-=-=-= Rose Shank was an experimental 4k intro. The experiment was to see if it was feasible to build a small virtual machine with a custom bytecode to run the intro, and if it was easier/smaller. It was a given that faster it is not. :) This language was named IL4 Lisp-ahtava (the compiler is called il4c). As the name says, the language uses the lisp syntax as its syntax. That's about all there's common to it. The reason the lisp parantheses syntax was chosen, was to facilitate fast turnabout while developing the language further (adding new constructs was a lot easier this way, as the lexer/parser stayed the same). Overview -=-=-=-= Il4c reads and parses all the given source files given to it at once. The files are interpreted as if they were joined together, and all symbols are globally visible. IL4 then performs a number of simple optimizations over the code. This includes stripping functions that are never called. Not much is done to the actual code. This gives greater control to the IL4 programmer (for example in C a small change may make a huge effect on the inlining and code size in general). All inlining and such should be done by hand. Il4c then generates a suitable bytecode for the remaining code. Only the operations that are needed are assigned a bytecode. As a last step, il4c generates one assembly file "out.asm" which contains both the generated bytecode interpreter and the actual bytecode. This asm file is designed to be compiled by nasm. The linker used may be the microsoft linker, but Crinkler is the only linker ever tested with il4c. To compile Rose Shank, run compile.sh with cygwin. You may need to modify it to set the correct library paths (uses the win32 libraries from Visual Studio). IL4 -=- A few words about the IL4 language (as there is virtually no ducmentation about it) to get the prominent reader started. Start from "test.il4" (the startup function "main" is there) and "core.il4" (most of the basic math functions and such are there). Comments start with a # char and go up to the end of the line. The language is totally untyped (well, strictly speaking the type is "32-bits" :). That means you have to be careful to call the right arithmetic and comparison functions (as well as others). The values may very well be pointers, integers, floats or whatever. On the top level an IL4 file may contain roughly the following elements: - Constants. When referenced, the reference is replaced with the constant value. These are just handy shorthands for giving names to numbers. Example: (const pi 3.1415926535897932384626433832795) - Global variables. These may have a constant value set to them or not. Example: (var room_floor_lights) (var cam_ang 0.0) - Bytecode functions. These take 0 or more arguments, then execute the code in their body. Example: # Random function returning a float with an integer interval [mini,maxi[. (fun rand_rangef (mini maxi) i2f (rand_range mini maxi)) Notes on example: "i2f" is a function that takes one argument, and it changes an integer to a float. "rand_range" is another function that takes 2 arguments. - Assembly functions. These are special functions. When called, these functions compile to one bytecode, and their raw assembly is executed instead. The code is copied as-is to the final output to the relevant location. Note that the arguments are passed to the stack from left to right (for asmfuns); that is, pop eax would pop the last argument. It's assumed that every asmfun pops all of their arguments from the stack, and place one value to the stack after they're done (every function returns something always). Example: (asmfun +i (a b) "pop eax" "add [esp], eax") - Compiler directives. Currently there is only one, "heapsize". This isn't used in Rose Shank, but it sets the amount of heap to allocate for the executable. The allocator in Rose Shank is a simple pointer incrementer, so make sure you have enough heap so the pointer doesn't grow over it. Most of the things inside function bodies are: - Other function calls - "(if (expr) (then) (else))" where "expr", "then" and "else" are some code blocks. - Variable definitions (same as globals but inside functions). - Variable sets, "(set var-name value)" - While loops, "(while (expr) code)" This is the only looping mechanism in IL4. - External symbol pointer lookups, "(external_symbol "_wglCreateContext@4)" This compiles directly to a constant value, which is a pointer to the symbol. This helper form is used to call external C/asm functions. - Stdcalls/Cdecl calls. Some examples: (fun glVertex3fv (arr) (stdcall (external_symbol "_glVertex3fv@4") arr)) (fun glViewport (x y w h) (stdcall (external_symbol "_glViewport@16") x y w h)) There are different forms for functions which return a floating point value, namely "stdcall-fp" and "cdecl-fp". Tips -=-= Modify the compile.sh script and change the parameters a little. There are a few optimizations which really made the packed code bigger (even though the raw object file was smaller). Also the "-save-debug" switch is useful as it saves the middle forms (tree forms before/after optimization) for the program. "il4c -help" gives the list of command line options. Read & try to understand the generated "out.asm" file. Some quick notes about it: - Every assembly function end with a "jmp ebx" - Every opcode has a 16bit loopup index to it's code - Every bytecode function has a 16bit lookup index to it's code - Every bytecode function has 16bits of function header and one return bytecode at the end (8bit); total overhead 3 bytes - Constants currently take 4 bytes each. - Every global that has a preset value takes 4 bytes (even if the same value is used as a constant elsewhere). - Globals that have no preset values take no space. Doubles were a bit hacked in (as the general type is "32-bits"). The only functions that required doubles in Rose Shank were OpenGL calls which follow the stdcall calling convention. What we do, is use a asmfun which converts a float to a double on the stack. Because the stdcall convention requires for the function to clean it's own arguments, this hack works (as the correct amount of items are on the stack after the call). To compile the HD version, modify compile.sh to use "resolution_hd.il4" instead of "resolution.il4". License -=-=-=- These sources and the IL4 compiler are released under the GPLv2 license (see LICENSE.txt). Contact -=-=-=- Web: http://www.xmunkki.org/ "Rose Shank" by XZM & tAAt 4k intro for Assembly 2007 Coded with Lisp-ahtava (IL4). Websites for contacting us -------------------------- Jere Sanisalo - http://www.xmunkki.org Jetro Lauha - http://jet.ro Credits ------- Created by: Jere "XMunkki" Sanisalo Jetro "tonic" Lauha Acknowledgements: Dibhda - Design help. st Rana - Design help. Sol - Absolutely nothing. The excellent Crinkler was used to compress the intro: http://www.crinkler.net This product has been verified to be compliant with Assembly rules and regulations. CRINKLER - Compressing linker for Windows specialized for 4k intros Aske Simon Christensen "Blueberry/Loonies" Rune L. H. Stubbe "Mentor/TBC" Version 1.0a (January 7, 2007) VERSION HISTORY --------------- 07.01.07: 1.0a: New /VERBOSE:FUNCTIONS options to sort the functions. Various verbose output fixes. Various crash fixes. A fix to the /FIX Crinkler version recognizer. 27.12.06: 1.0: Output EXE files are now Windows Vista compatible. Compression tweak for greatly improved compression ratio. Much faster compression. Automatically takes advantage of multiple processors. Improved Visual Studio 2005 integration. /COMPMODE:INSTANT option for very quick compression. /ORDERTRIES option to try out different section orderings. /SAFEIMPORT option to insert a check for nonexisting DLLs. /PROGRESSGUI option for a graphical progress bar. /REPLACEDLL option to replace one DLL with another. /FIX option to fix compatibility problems of older versions. 09.02.06: 0.4a: Fixed linker crash problem with blank member entries in some library files (such as glut32). The /PRIORITY option was not mentioned in the commandline usage help. 18.12.05: 0.4: Changed header and import code to make output EXE files compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows. Fixed a bug in the ordinal range import mechanism. Added a switch to control the process priority. Added a warning for range import of an unused DLL. Some more header squeezing. 31.10.05: 0.3: Output EXE files are now Windows 2000 compatible. Added a number of verbose options to output useful information about the program being compressed. Added an option for transforming function calls to use absolute offsets to improve compression. Fixed a bug in the linker regarding identically named sections. Fixed a potential crash bug in the linker. Various small tweaks and optimizations. 23.07.05: 0.2: Fixed bug in the decompressor. Changed the behaviour of the /CRINKLER option. Added timing to the progress bars. Some updates to the manual and usage description. 21.07.05: 0.1: First release. BACKGROUND ---------- Ever since the concept of size-limited demo competitions was introduced in the early 1990's (and before that as well), people have been using executable file compressors to reduce the size of their final executables. An executable file compressor is a program that takes as input an executable file and produces a new executable file which has the same behaviour as the original one but is (hopefully) smaller. The usual technique employed by executable file compressors is to compress the contents of the executable file using some general purpose data compression method and prepend to this compressed data a small piece of code (the decompressor) which decompresses the contents into memory in such a way that it looks to the code as if the original executable file had been loaded into memory in the normal way. The size of the decompressor is usually around a few hundred bytes, depending on the complexity of the compression method. This constitutes an unavoidable overhead in the compressed file, which is particularly evident for small files, such as 4k intros. Furthermore, the header of the Windows EXE file format contains a lot of information that needs to be there at fixed offsets in order for Windows to be able to load the file. The presence of these overheads from the header and decompressor has motivated people to look for other means of compressing their 4k intros. Until Crinkler came around, the most popular strategy for compressing 4k intros for Windows was CAB dropping: A few simple transformations are performed on the executable to make it compress better (such as merging sections and setting unused header fields to zero), and the result is compressed using the Cabinet Compression tool included with Windows. The resulting .CAB file is renamed to have .BAT extension, and some commands are inserted into the file such that when the .BAT file is executed, it decompresses the executable to disk (using the Cabinet decompression command), runs the executable and then deletes the executable again. This saves the size of the decompression code (since an external program is used to do the decompression) and some of the size of the header (since the header can be compressed). Various dropping strategies combined with other space-saving hacks people have employed on their 4k intros (in particular import by ordinal) have caused severe compatibility problems. More often than not, people who want to run a newly released 4k intro find that it does not work on their own machine. In recent years, it has been customary to include a 'compatible' version in the distribution which is larger than 4k but works on all machines. The term '4k intro' seems to mean '4k on the compo machine' intro. The main motivation for starting the Crinkler project has been the feeling that the existing means available for compressing 4k intros are unsatisfactory. We want 4k intros that are self-contained EXE files. We want 4k intros that are 4 kilobytes in size. Our aim for Crinkler is to be the cleanest, most effective and most compatible executable compressor for Windows 4k intros. INTRODUCTION ------------ Crinkler is a different approach to executable file compression. While an ordinary executable file compressor operates on the executable file produced by the linker from object files, Crinkler replaces the linker by a combined linker and compressor. The result is an EXE file which does not do any kind of dropping. It decompresses into memory like a traditional executable file compressor. Crinkler employs a range of techniques to reduce the size of the resulting EXE file beyond what is usually obtained by using CAB compression: - Having control over the linking step gives much more flexibility in the optimizations and transformations possible on the data before and after compression. - The compression technique used by Crinkler is based on context modelling, which is far superior in compression ratio to the LZ variants used by CAB and most other compressors. The disadvantage of context modelling is that it is extremely slow, but this is of little importance when only 4 kilobytes need to be compressed. It also needs quite a lot of memory for decompression, but this is again not a problem, since the typical 4k intro uses a lot of memory anyway. - The actual compression algorithm performs many passes over the data in order to optimize the internal parameters of the compressor. This results in slower compression, but this is usually a reasonable price to pay for the extra bytes gained on the file size. - The contents of the executable are split into two parts - a code part and a data part - and each of these are compressed individually. This leads to better compression, as code and data are usually very different in structure and so do not benefit from being compressed together. - DLL functions are imported by hash code. This is robust to structural changes to the DLL between different versions while being quite compact - only 4 bytes per imported function. For DLLs with fixed relative ordinals (such as opengl32), a special technique, ordinal range import, can be used to further reduce the number of hash codes needed. - Much of the data in the EXE header is actually ignored by the EXE loader. Some of this space is used for some of the decompression code, and the rest is used to store hash codes for imported functions. Using Crinkler is somewhat different from using an ordinary executable file compressor because of the linking step. In the following sections, we describe its use in detail. INSTALLATION ------------ To use as a stand-alone linker, Crinkler does not need any installation. Simply run crinkler.exe from the commandline with appropriate arguments, as described in the next section. However, if you are using Microsoft Visual Studio to develop your intro, the easiest way to use Crinkler is to run it in place of the normal Visual Studio linker. Crinkler has been designed as a drop-in replacement of the Visual Studio linker, supporting the same basic options. All of the options can then be set using the Visual Studio configuration window. Unfortunately, Visual Studio does not (as of this writing) support replacing its linker by a different one. So what you have to do is the following: - Copy crinkler.exe to your project directory and rename it to link.exe. Visual Studio will then find it when it tries to invoke the linker. If you are using some other linker with a different name, such as the one used with the Intel C++ compiler, call it whatever the name of the linker is. - If you are using Visual Studio 2005, select Tools/Options... and go to Projects and Solutions/VC++ Directories. At the top of the list for Executable files, add $(SolutionDir). This will make sure that the project directory is searched for the linker executable. - In the Release configuration (or whichever configuration you want to enable compression), under Linker/Command Line/Additional Options, type in /CRINKLER, along with any other Crinkler options you want to set. See the next section for more details on options. If you are using Visual Studio 2005, set Linker/Manifest File/Generate Manifest to No. If you have Visual Studio installed but want to run Crinkler from the commandline, the easiest way is to use the Visual Studio Command Prompt (available from the Start menu), since this sets up the LIB environment variable correctly. You can read off the value of the environment variables by running the 'set' command in this command prompt. If you are using a different command prompt, you will have to set up the LIB environment variable manually, or use the /LIBPATH option. USAGE ----- The general form of the command line for Crinkler is: CRINKLER [options] [object files] [library files] [@commandfile] When running from within Visual Studio, the object files will be the ones generated from the sources in the project. The library files will be the standard set of Win32 libraries, plus any additional library files specified under Linker/Input/Additional Dependencies. If you are using a standard runtime library, such as libc or msvcrt, you will have to specify this one manually. The following options are compatible with the VS linker and can be set using switches in the Visual Studio configuration window: /SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS (Linker/System/SubSystem) Specify the Windows subsystem to use. If the subsystem is CONSOLE, a console window will be opened when the program starts. The subsystem also determines the name of the default entry point (see /ENTRY). The default subsystem is WINDOWS. /OUT:[file] (Linker/General/Output File) Specify the name of the resulting executable file. The default name is out.exe. /ENTRY:[symbol] (Linker/Advanced/Entry Point) Specify the entry label in the code. The default entry label is mainCRTStartup for CONSOLE subsystem applications and WinMainCRTStartup for WINDOWS subsystem applications. /LIBPATH:[path] (Linker/General/Additional Library Directories) Add a number of directories (separated by semicolons) to the ones searched for library files. If a library is not found in any of these, the directories mentioned in the LIB environment variable are searched. @commandfile Commandline arguments will be read from the given file, as if they were given directly on the commandline. In addition to the above options, a number of options can be given to control the compression process. These can be specified under Linker/Command Line/Additional Options: /CRINKLER Enable the Crinkler compressor. If this option is disabled, Crinkler will search through the path for a command with the same name as itself, skipping itself, and pass all arguments on to this command instead. This will normally invoke the Visual Studio linker. If the name of the Crinkler executable is crinkler.exe, this option is enabled by default, otherwise it is disabled by default. /FIX Fix a program compressed using an older version of Crinkler so that it works on all versions of Windows 2000, XP and Vista. When this option is specified, all other options except /OUT are ignored, and Crinkler takes a single file argument, which must be an output EXE file from Crinkler 0.3 or newer. /PRIORITY:IDLE /PRIORITY:BELOWNORMAL /PRIORITY:NORMAL Select the process priority at which Crinkler will run while compressing. The default priority is BELOWNORMAL. Use IDLE if you want Crinkler to disturb you as little as possible. Use NORMAL if you don't need your machine for anything else while compressing. /COMPMODE:INSTANT /COMPMODE:FAST /COMPMODE:SLOW Choose between three different compression modes. The FAST mode usually compresses in a couple of seconds, while the SLOW one can take up to a few minutes to complete. The slow one usually compresses about 10-40 bytes better on a 4k executable. Use INSTANT if you just want to check that your program works in compressed form and don't care about the size. The default compression mode is FAST. /HASHSIZE:[memory size] Specify the amount of memory the decompressor is allowed to use while decompressing, in megabytes. In general, the more memory the decompressor is allowed to use, the better the compression ratio will be, though only slightly. The memory requirements of the final executable (the size of the executable image when loaded into memory) will be the maximum of this value and the original image size. The memory will not be deallocated until the program terminates, and any heap allocation the program performs will add to this memory usage. The default value is 100, which is usually a good compromise. /HASHTRIES:[number of retries] Specify the number of different hash table sizes the compressor will try in order to find one with few collisions. More tries lead to longer compression time but slightly better compression. The default value is 20. Higher values rarely improve the size by more than a few bytes. /ORDERTRIES:[number of retries] Specify the number of section reordering iterations that the linker will try out in search for the ordering that gives the best compression ratio. The default is not to do any reordering. Specifying this option drastically increases the compression time, since Crinkler has to calculate the compressed size anew on every reordering. Usually, the size does not improve noticeably after a few thousand iterations. /RANGE:[DLL name] Import functions from the given DLL (without the .dll suffix) using ordinal range import. Ordinal range import imports the first used function by hash and the rest by ordinal relative to the first one. Ordinal range import is safe to use on DLLs in which the ordinals are fixed relative to each other, such as opengl32 or d3dx9_??. This option can be specified multiple times, for different DLLs. /REPLACEDLL:[oldDLL=newDLL] Whenever a function is imported from oldDLL, import it from newDLL instead. DLL replacement is useful when the end user might not have the version of the DLL that you are linking to. Typical examples are replacing msvcr70, msvcr71 or msvcr80 by msvcrt and replacing one version of d3dx9_?? by another. Only use this option if you know that the two DLLs are compatible. When REPLACEDLL and RANGE are used together, RANGE must refer to the new DLL. /SAFEIMPORT If the executable fails to load some DLL, it will pop up a message box with the DLL name rather than crash. This will increase the file size by around 20 bytes. /TRANSFORM:CALLS Change the relative jump offsets in all internal call instructions (E8 opcode) into absolute offsets from the start of the code. This usually improves compression, since multiple calls to the same function become identical. The transformation has an overhead of about 20 bytes for the detransformation code, but the net savings on a full 4k can be as large as 50 bytes, depending on the number of calls in your code. Finally, Crinkler has a number of options for controlling the output during compression. Just like the other options, these can be specified under Linker/Command Line/Additional Options: /VERBOSE:FUNCTIONS /VERBOSE:FUNCTIONS-BYNAME /VERBOSE:FUNCTIONS-BYSIZE For each function in the program, output the size of the function in bytes before and after compression. This can help you decide whether specific optimizations you try out on your code are worthwhile. Note that the compressed size of a function depends heavily on what comes before it. If you have two almost identical functions, the second one will be much smaller, since the contents of the first one will guide the compression of the second. By default, the functions are written in the order in which they occur in the linked code. If you specify -BYNAME or -BYSIZE, they will be sorted in alphabetical order or by decreasing compressed size, respectively. For this option to work, you must enable debugging information in your object files. In Visual Studio, this is done by selecting a debugging information format under C/C++/General/Debug Information Format. Any format other than Disbled will work. /VERBOSE:LABELS As /VERBOSE:FUNCTIONS, but instead of showing the size of functions, the sizes between every label is shown. This will show the sizes of code as well as data and does not require any debugging information apart from the labels. /VERBOSE:IMPORTS List all functions imported from DLLs. The functions are grouped by DLL, and functions imported by ordinal range import are grouped into ranges. /VERBOSE:MODELS List the model masks and weights selected by the compressor. This is mostly for internal use. /PROGRESSGUI Open a window showing a graphical progress indicator. An example commandline for linking and compressing an intro could look like this (split on multiple lines for readability): crinkler.exe /OUT:micropolis.exe /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /RANGE:opengl32 /COMPMODE:SLOW /ORDERTRIES:1000 /VERBOSE:IMPORTS /VERBOSE:LABELS kernel32.lib user32.lib gdi32.lib opengl32.lib glu32.lib winmm.lib micropolis\startup.obj micropolis\render.obj micropolis\render-asm.obj micropolis\sound.obj micropolis\sound-asm.obj RECOMMENDATIONS --------------- There are a number of things you can do as intro programmer to boost the compression achieved by Crinkler even further. This section gives some advice on these. - Do not use a standard runtime library. If you really need some standard library functions, use msvcrt.lib and use your own entry point using the /ENTRY option. This will skip the standard startup code, saving you around half a kilobyte. - Since much of the effectiveness of Crinkler comes from separating code and data into different parts of the file and compressing each part individually, it is important that this separation is possible. Mark your code and data sections as containing code and data, respectively, and do not put both code and data into the same section. See your assembler manual for information about how to do this. For instance, in Nasm, you can write the keyword "text" or "data" after the section name and give sections different names to prevent them from being merged by the assembler. - Split both your code and your data into as many sections as possible. This gives Crinkler more opportunities to select the ordering of the sections to optimize the compression ratio. - If you are using OpenGL, use ordinal range import for opengl32. If you are using Direct3D, use ordinal range import for d3dx9_??. This drastically reduces the space needed for function hash codes. - Avoid large blocks of data, even if they are all zero. Use uninitialized (bss) sections instead. Crinkler does not cope well with large amounts of data. Be aware that the compressor may use an amount of memory up to about 4000 times the uncompressed code/data size (whichever is largest). - When you perform detailed size comparisons, always use the SLOW compression mode with plenty of HASHTRIES. The INSTANT and FAST modes are only intended for use during testing and to give a rough estimate of the compressed size. Also note that the compression is tuned for the 4k size target, so any size comparisons you perform on smaller files might turn out to behave differently when you get nearer to 4k. - As a matter of good conduct, always use SAFEIMPORT if you can spare the space, and do not set HASHSIZE higher than you need. In other words, if your final intro is well below the size limit, enable SAFEIMPORT and then lower HASHSIZE in order not to waste memory unnecessarily. COMMON PROBLEMS, KNOWN BUGS AND LIMITATIONS ------------------------------------------- Any DLL that is needed by a program that Crinkler compresses must be available to Crinkler itself. If you get the error message 'Could not open DLL ...', it means that Crinkler needed the DLL but could not find it. You must place it either in the same directory as the Crinkler executable or somewhere in the DLL path, such as C:\WINDOWS\system32. Alternatively, you can use the REPLACEDLL option to replace it by one that is available. If you launch your Crinkler-compressed program from within Visual Studio, use Start Without Debugging (Ctrl+F5) rather than Start Debugging (F5). The debugger cannot handle Crinkler-compressed executables. If the program crashes, you can still attach the debugger in the normal way. When running inside Visual Studio, the textual progress bars are not updated correctly, since the Visual Studio console does not flush the output until a newline is reached, even when explicitly flushed by the running program. Use the /PROGRESSGUI option to get a graphical progress bar. The code for parsing object and library files contains only a minimum of sanity checks. If you pass a corrupt file to Crinkler, it will most likely crash. The import code does not support forwarded RVA imports, which means that some functions, such as HeapAlloc, cannot be used. This makes Crinkler unable to link with libc. What a loss. The final compressed size must be less than 64k, or Crinkler will fail horribly. You shouldn't use it for such big files anyway. Crinkler does not support the whole program optimization feature of Visual Studio (General/Whole Program Optimization). Do not turn it on. SUPPORT ------- Try out Crinkler, and let us know what you think about it. If you have any problems, comments or suggestions, please write a message at the Pouet.net forum: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=18158 If you want to contact us directly, e.g. for sending us a file, write to authors@crinkler.net. The newest released version of Crinkler can always be found at http://www.crinkler.net. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ---------------- The compression technique used by Crinkler is much inspired by the PAQ compressor by Matt Mahoney. The import code is loosely based on the hashed imports code by Peci. Many thanks to all the people who have given us comments, bug reports and test material, especially to Rambo, Kusma, Polaris, Gargaj, Frenetic, Buzzie, Shash, Auld, Minas, Skarab, Dwing, Freak5, Hunta, Snq, Darkblade, Abductee, Las and Hitchhikr. Also thanks to Dwarf, Polygon7 and Gargaj for suggestions for our web design. Our special thanks to the many people who have demostrated the usefulness of Crinkler by using it for their own productions. Keep it going! 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