SGDK VS open62541

I'm working on a game for Amiga (another 68k-based platform) and settled on ZX0 to decompress assets on the fly: https://github.com/einar-saukas/ZX0

I was originally using LZ4, but I switched to ZX0 after learning that it can do in-place decompression, which means I don't have to allocate separate memory for the compressed data. I'm very happy with the compression ratio, and decompression of large assets (~48kb) only takes a few frames on a 7MHz 68000.

Also of note is LZ4W, included in Sega Genesis Dev Kit (and discussed in the comments section of OP's article), a variant of LZ4 that only uses word-aligned operations. That makes it much faster on the 68000, which can struggle to efficiently handle 8-bit data. More info here: https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/blob/master/bin/lz4w.txt

It might have needed two at one point. I see both mentioned in a few places, but the wiki appears to say you need the full path. https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/wiki/SGDK-Usage

P.S. The plan down the line is to at some point add sprites to it and port it to the Sega Genesis using SGDK so it would no longer be a text adventure game. However for now I'm having fun practicing my C skills with this and hopefully will have a cool project for my portfolio.

Examples: - Someone I know created machine-optimized library in c and asm to accelerate compression, erasure coding, and encryption on Intel Xeon CPUs (https://github.com/intel/isa-l) which runs those ops WAY faster than the standard linux libraries. - My friend is making a retro SEGA genesis game using a C and asm dev kit (https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK)

If you are specifically looking into the Genesis you should look into SGDK, the sega development toolkit https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK.

Zip trees are great!

For a project I made a version that uses the memory location of the entries to construct the (random) rank on the fly.

So it’s a binary tree structure that requires the same memory as a linked list (two pointers) only!

https://github.com/open62541/open62541/blob/master/deps/zipt...

Here is a bug report I submitted to open62541, over a year ago. Figuring out how that library works... I don't even understand the terminology; it's all very generic (everything is called 'nodes', 'objects', etc.), there are loads of ways to do anything, type safety is not a concept the library approves of so that doesn't help either, and most functions you cannot even find in the source as they are generated by macros. It doesn't help that OPC UA is a big standard (thousands of pages) either. It boggles the mind that the reference implementation for something used in so many critical places is so badly documented, and at the same time allows so many ways to get things subtly wrong.

There's quite a bit of OPC UA bashing across this project. So let me chime in to keep the "balance in the universe".

OPC UA is a protocol to interact with an object-oriented information model. Basically CORBA done right to use object-oriented principles and reuse software components in industrial automation.

Since OPC UA is a protocol, its performance depends mostly on the implementation. Some PLCs may be crappy. But that doesn't translate into bad performance overall. My experience goes to the exact contrary.

Full disclosure, I lead-develop and maintain an open source OPC UA implementation that sees quite a bit of use by the big guys in the automation domain. We use C for performance. And we do have funding from the industry.

https://github.com/open62541/open62541

But yes, it is hard to break into this world. Especially since solutions have to be maintained for 20+ years. A solo developer usually cannot ensure that this will still be usable some years down the line.

Earlier this year I was trying to use open62541, and ended up writing this bugreport. The developers are, so far, ignoring it, and it's a crying shame because it makes the library so much less useful than it could otherwise be.

Why don't you use a standardized industrial protocol, that support these requirements? Would perhaps OPC UA meet your needs? There are a number of open source implementations and the standard itself is open, too.