Talk:MegaMan 2 PTC/@comment-15296152-20140801184225

Well, I'm likely going back to how I compressed graphics before I tried out LZ77 compression. LZ77 works well, but because graphics are in string-form, it tacks on a whole lot of time to decompress them (even when I custom-made an LZ77 decompression routine just for it). Last night I was inspired to go back to my old routine, because I realized one of the most important things about programming with equations. When the range is small and the calculations are heavy, then just pre-calculate everything, and read them via array. Since the range for decompression is only 256 * 3, pre-calculating 768 entries and reading from that instead of equations having a good 8 or so operators and function calls, it'll speed things up a LOT. The original routine took maybe about 1/3 the time that LZSS graphic decompression took, and this new idea will take at least 1/2 the time the original took. The old routine compressed the graphics to about 90kB whereas LZ77 compression was 86kB, only 4kB smaller, so really, not much loss there when taking into account how fast it'll be.