color-flood-for-amstrad-cpc VS lzsa

const int myarray[mysize];

* Good news: C can do compile time constant structs and array with deep self-references.

Yes, in C you can define and fully declare complex data structures that are accepted as compile-time constants, including pointers to parts of itself.

See "self-contained, statically allocated, totally const data structure with backward and forward references (pointers)?" for a previous example at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47037701/can-c-syntax-de...

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I used this for a game on a retro machine where such a data structure avoids code which would have been several times (perhaps 10 times) bigger: https://github.com/cpcitor/color-flood-for-amstrad-cpc/blob/...

Here's another take showing two variant: where overall construct is an array then a struct: https://gist.github.com/fidergo-stephane-gourichon/792c194e1...

True.

If you're on your way down this rabbit hole, there's a bunch of old-machine-specific compression algorithms, developed by the emulator community, e.g. LZSA: https://github.com/emmanuel-marty/lzsa

There's quite a lot of retro modern LZ activity too! LZ turns out to be amazing on old machines, often only several times slower than a block copy. Optimal compressors and control over the algorithm have led to some very tight demos.

https://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/crossdevtools/lz4/index... LZ4 Data Compression - a rather long and in-depth article looking at LZ4 on the 65816 for the Apple IIgs

https://github.com/emmanuel-marty/lzsa - LZSA - a LZ4-like modern LZ that's more efficient both in speed and compression to LZ4 (at least on the 8 bitters it targets).