libgamearchive VS w64devkit

A rewrite was also sorely needed, even without changing the language. One of the "mistakes" I made with the C++ architecture of libgamearchive for example, was to try to modify archive files in-place, as opposed to writing a new archive file out from scratch and then moving it over the top of the original file. While it can be significantly quicker editing in-place, it introduces a huge amount of complexity and to be honest, the amount of time spent debugging problems caused by this is just not worth it. The compression and encryption algorithms as well, they are streaming so work whether you write one byte at a time or one megabyte at a time (and will process terabytes of data without issue), but having them track what point they are up to across multiple calls like that adds a huge amount of complexity (just look at all the case statements in the Monster Bash RLE encoder so the function can resume at the correct point in subsequent calls). So regardless of language, it was due for a major refactor anyway as continuing with this amount of complexity was just not worth the headaches it brings. Especially on today's hardware, writing out a 40 MB .GRP file from scratch will take well under a second, so spending hours, sometimes days, debugging write-in-place problems just isn't worth the benefit.

Try w64devkit https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

Click "View raw" to download. The executable is just ~3kB. If you'd like to try building it yourself, I distribute a Windows XP-friendly, no-installation-required C and C++ toolchain, w64devkit. The 32-bit toolchains are labeled "i686" (on the right under "Releases"). The build command (cc ...) is at the top of the source file.

I bundle my preferred tools together in a standalone compiler toolkit for Windows: w64devkit. Except Git and documentation (see the links in the README), that's essentially everything I need to be productive.

I have a Dockerfile here that goes through all the steps bootstrapping a Mingw-w64 toolchain from source: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

FWIW, both GNU objcopy and GNU ld (including e.g. the XCOPY-deployable ones from w64devkit[1]) are perfectly capable[2] of turning binary data into MSVC-acceptable COFF files with start and end symbols, while Free Pascal, for example, straight up ships with a bin2obj tool; the MSVC toolset is the outlier here.

[1] https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

[2] https://www.devever.net/~hl/incbin

Sounds like an high priority issue to solve first. I distribute a toolchain that doesn't require installation and includes a debugger: w64devkit (see "Releases"). You can pluck out the gdb.exe since it's statically linked and doesn't depend on anything else in the kit.

This particular case is a Windows program due to Winsock, and I happen to include all the above tools, except SDL2, a small Mingw-w64 distribution, w64devkit. So it doesn't take much!

Similar project providing slightly fewer tools: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit