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authorB. Watson <urchlay@slackware.uk>2025-11-13 05:39:38 -0500
committerB. Watson <urchlay@slackware.uk>2025-11-13 05:39:38 -0500
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+unalf project README.
+
+The ultimate goal of this project is to reimplement the ALF
+compression and decompression algorithms on modern systems aka
+Linux and anything else that's POSIX-ish. It's also intended to
+be a repository of information about the ALF archiver (and UNALF
+dearchiver).
+
+What's here so far:
+
+README.txt - you're reading it now.
+
+TODO.txt - plans for the future.
+
+src/ - the source. should be able to build with "cd src; make",
+followed by "make install" if you want.
+
+f65/ - "fake 6502" porting layer. Not for the faint of heart. The
+unalf algorithm was ported from a disassembly of the 6502 code, using
+a perl script to convert the 6502 mnemonics to C macros. This means I
+was able to port the code without fully understanding how it works...
+
+doc/Arcinfo - describes the format of ARC compressed files. The ALF
+file structure is almost identical to ARC's. This file was taken from
+the arc-5.21q source.
+
+doc/alf14.atr - the distribution disk for ALF version 1.4, as an Atari
+8-bit single-density floppy disk image. This likely isn't the original
+distribution disk, but it's the only one I've found on the various
+archive sites.
+
+doc/alf14_doc.txt - the documentation for ALF and UNALF, extracted
+from the disk image and converted from ATASCII to standard ASCII. Note
+that the filenames are different: LZ.COM for ALF14.COM and DZ.COM for
+UNALF14.COM.
+
+doc/fileformat.txt - documents how the ALF file format differs from ARC.
+
+doc/review.txt - a review of the original ALFCrunch, from an Atari magazine.
+
+examples/* - ALF files found in the wild.
+
+testing/alfls - a Perl script that lists the contents of an ALF
+archive. Run it with --help for more information. If you're packaging
+unalf for a distribution, there's no need to include this script in
+the package: I wrote it for testing purposes only. You can use "unalf
+-l" to list .alf files, so this is redundant.