Would be be possible to implement a file compression/decompression in DCS or is the app already bursting at the seams? I made an Axe program a couple years ago which did a RLE pass followed by Huffman coding and was pretty impressed by the results, usually a 2-3 compression ratio on common programs such as mario. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly, but the compiled compressor was 1-2KB and the decoder was smaller, <1KB, so I'd imagine in assembly both subroutines could be written in a total of 1K or less.
I never made an interface for it because I'd be duplicating a lot of features of other shells and the best use case would be automatic decoding/encoding upon read/write to flash memory anyway. And I found that I didn't have enough ram for both the encoder and large files, so I had to move the encoder to an 16KB app, which kind of defeats the purpose.
I think a shell like DCS would be the perfect place to put these features that I couldn't implement in Axe. Alternatively, someone could implement a higher-order program (on a computer) that takes an 8xp file as input and outputs the corresponding self-extracting program. If the second option is feasible it's probably better as it's universal and more powerful, but I don't know where the program could find space to extract itself on the calculator. (Maybe someone with more knowledge of TI-84+ hardware can help me out)
I never made an interface for it because I'd be duplicating a lot of features of other shells and the best use case would be automatic decoding/encoding upon read/write to flash memory anyway. And I found that I didn't have enough ram for both the encoder and large files, so I had to move the encoder to an 16KB app, which kind of defeats the purpose.
I think a shell like DCS would be the perfect place to put these features that I couldn't implement in Axe. Alternatively, someone could implement a higher-order program (on a computer) that takes an 8xp file as input and outputs the corresponding self-extracting program. If the second option is feasible it's probably better as it's universal and more powerful, but I don't know where the program could find space to extract itself on the calculator. (Maybe someone with more knowledge of TI-84+ hardware can help me out)
