SNES ROM compression

[encode]

It's interesting, but some SNES (Super Nintendo) games utilizes LZSS compression.

It's quite a baseline LZSS compression, meaning 1-bit literal/match flag and a 16-bit LZ code, describing match length and offset. Usually, a window size is about 4 KB.

Some example outputs:

Dragon Ball Z - (One of the RPGs):
O3 O2 O1 O0 L3 L2 L1 L0 | OB OA O9 O8 O7 O6 O5 O4
 
Final Fantasy 7:
O7 O6 O5 O4 O3 O2 O1 O0 | OB OA O9 O8 L3 L2 L1 L0
 
Ogre Battle:
L4 L3 L2 L1 L0 OA O9 O8 | O7 O6 O5 O4 O3 O2 O1 O0
 
Record of Lodoss Wars:
O7 O6 O5 O4 O3 O2 O1 O0 | O8 L6 L5 L4 L3 L2 L1 L0

[schnaader]

Hmm... seems that LZSS is quite popular for some consoles (mainly Nintendo) and for encoding graphics/color palettes. Here are two links I found about this:

http://jiggawatt.org/badc0de/sixpack/
http://code.google.com/p/dsdecmp/

Also, some Wii games seem to use LZSS + Huffman (called "LZH8"), see here and here

[maadjordan]

thanks for the update i was into lzh long time ago and wiki link is more concise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHA_(file_format)

[willvarfar]

tangentially, PVRTC (low frequency signal modulation compression) is neat for people interested in these things; still used on the iPhone and other devices with Imagination GPUs in them