DeCrunchers - English Manual MOTIVATION Decrunch this old cool demos wasting their time in your overloaded disk-box and rip the music, gfx and mybe the code from them, even on an Amiga with Kick 2.04 and 68020 or more... DISCLAIMER The author cannot be held liable for the suitability or accuracy of this manual and/or the program(s) it describes. Any damage directly or indirectly caused by the use or misuse of this manual and/or the program it describes is the sole responsibility of the user her/him self. NAMES DeBytekiller DeTetragon SYNOPSIS DeBytekiller DeTetragon DESCRIPTION DeBytekiller and DeTetragon are command line decruncher utilities especially designed for use with file manipulating gui tools as SID, Directory Opus or anything similar that is able to understand file-classes. But they can of course also be used in a normal shell-environment. They were made to enable you to decrunch programs (usually demos) that are crunched with the Bytekiller V2.0 cruncher or the Tetragon Cruncher V2.2(norm). Programs crunched by this tools depend on absolute addresses and are in no way designed to work well on a multitasking enviroment such as the amiga-operating system is. It is quite dangerous to start this programs on any Amiga-Workbench driven system and not to get in serious trouble with system-shutdowns, because of the illegal absolute mem-adressing used by the decruncher. So I decided to write a tool which decrunches these files in a safe way, to get them back in raw-format. This is e.g. useful for people who want to rip music-mod files or gfx from these programs, or just to read the long scroll texts of demos to the end. WARNING This programs are in no way designed to violate the rights of any kind of copyrighted software. Be careful with the use of this tools on any kind of soft where you expect to give parts of the developed raw file to anybody else. Usually demos aren`t copyrighted in this way, but it could offend the people who worked hours and hours on this treasures if you will send the modules, gfx and maybe the resourced code of their software through the world. I (the programer of this tools) could in no way be made responsible for the misuse of this tools! SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS DeBytekiller and DeTetragon will run on any Amiga system with at least 512KB RAM , one diskdrive and OS 2.04. But if you want to decrunch bigger files it is responsible to have more memory, because the source and the destination must be held together in the mem while decrunching. Due to modifications to the decrunch routines it is even possible to run the tools on any processor platform, where the original routine fails. They were tested on an A500, A3000 and A4000/40 without any problems occurring. USAGE From shell: Select the file you want to decrunch by snooping through it with a file examiner tool or try it simply out. Make sure you have enough space on the device where the the file xxx to decrunch is stored, because the tools will store the raw data in the same directory with the extension xxx.raw. If xxx.raw already exists, you will get an error-message and nothing will be stored. From other gui-driven directory-tools: This depends heavily on the tools you use. But I think there will be no difficulties to develop a file class for autodetecting Bytekiller V2.0 and Tetragon V2.2n crunched files, if you are experienced with using this tools. A look in the source code will help, if you want to know the characteristics of the filetypes. KNOWN DIFFICULTIES The filetype checking especially of the DeBytekiller tool is not that perfect as it could be, because of lacking of too much characteristic bytes in the decrunch header. So it could be that the decruncher will know a file as a Bytekiller crunched file where there isn`t one. But that didn`t happen to me while I am decrunching more than 100 old demos, but maybe it could be.... FUTURE MOTIVATION If you think there exists interest in the support of multitasking friendly decrunchers for other "famous" absolute-adress based crunchers used by the demo-scene, or if you recognize any difficulties by the use of this little tools, then you should contact me as soon as possible. Maybe, I decide to write a file recognizing tool that automatically decrunches files with known filetypes. HISTORY DeBytekiller 1.0 DeTetragon 1.0 - first and hopefully last public Release COPYRIGHT DeBytekiller and DeTetragon are Copyright 1993 by Jürgen Lang. All rights reserved. These programs are FREEWARE, so no financial donations are required (but welcome). These programs may be freely distributed as long as all documentation and executable(s) remain unchanged and are included with the distribution. Also no profit is to be made by selling these programs. They must not be added to other PD-libraries than AmigaLibDisks from Fred Fish without my written permission. The price must not exceed the costs of disk, package and mailing. NOTES Directory Opus is copyright by INOVATRONICS and Jonathan Potter SID is copyright by Timm Martin SAS is copyright by SAS Institute, Inc, Cary, NC Bug reports, suggestions, postcards, flames, criticism, contributions, ideas, gifts, etc., etc., etc........... go to the author! AUTHOR Jürgen Lang Hinter der Mühle 4 6107-Reinheim 1 InterNet: chess@rbhp57.rgb.informatik.th-darmstadt.de FidoNet: Jürgen Lang@2:247/4.8