<story><title>How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine (1999)</title><url>http://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pubby</author><text>The crème de la crème of text compression for games back then was Huffman coding. I&amp;#x27;m a bit surprised Zork didn&amp;#x27;t use it, as surely it would have saved space.&lt;p&gt;Compression algorithms like LZ weren&amp;#x27;t viable in games until much later, as most computers lacked the memory and clock speed to run them quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toolslive</author><text>80s C64 demos already used compression (both Lempel-Ziv style and Huffman). Suppose the demo had 3 parts. When part 1 was running, part 2 and 3 were present in memory in compressed form (both code and data). When it was time to run part 2, it would be decompressed over the code and data of part 1. etc</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine (1999)</title><url>http://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pubby</author><text>The crème de la crème of text compression for games back then was Huffman coding. I&amp;#x27;m a bit surprised Zork didn&amp;#x27;t use it, as surely it would have saved space.&lt;p&gt;Compression algorithms like LZ weren&amp;#x27;t viable in games until much later, as most computers lacked the memory and clock speed to run them quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hguhghuff</author><text>Some of the Infocom games certainly used compression I believe by doing things like using 4 or 5 bits for characters instead of 8. I couldn’t tell you where I read that though.</text></comment>