On 2013-07-09, Dave Angel <da...@davea.name> wrote: >> One of the first Python project I undertook was a program to >> dump the ZSCII strings from Infocom game files. They are >> mostly packed one character per 5 bits, with escapes to (I had >> to recheck the Z-machine spec) latin-1. Oh, those clever >> implementors: thwarting hexdumping cheaters and cramming their >> games onto microcomputers with one blow. > > In 1973 I played with encoding some data that came over the > public airwaves (I never learned the specific radio technology, > probably used sidebands of FM stations). The data was encoded, > with most characters taking 5 bits, and the decoded stream was > like a ticker-tape. With some hardware and the right software, > you could track Wall Street in real time. (Or maybe it had the > usual 15 minute delay). > > Obviously, they didn't publish the spec any place. But some > others had the beginnings of a decoder, and I expanded on that. > We never did anything with it, it was just an interesting > challenge.
Interestingly similar scheme. It wonder if 5-bit chars was a common compression scheme. The Z-machine spec was never officially published either. I believe a "task force" reverse engineered it sometime in the 90's. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
