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. On Linux or similar, you should be able to build
with "make", followed by "make install" if you want. You have to use
GNU make, so the command may be "gmake".

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.