*** CKIT (Compression KIT compressed files)
*** Document revision: 1.3
*** Last updated: March 11, 2004
*** Contributors/sources: Paul David Doherty,
Todd Elliott
Written by Eugene F. Barker and Ryan Vander Stoep, this archiver does
whole-disk archiving from the various Commodore drives (1541/1571/1581), as
well as the larger CMD drives (hard disks). The latest known version is
"CKIT-94", meaning it was released in 1994. The compressor program is
commercial and dongle protected, but the decompressor is publically
available. From reports I have received the compression used is RLE, which
is not generally very good and it is also not very fast. One point in
CKIT's favor is that it supports all the presently available storage
devices (CMD hard disks, Commodore 15xx floppy drives).
The file extension for single disk files (i.e. when a compressed disk
archive only takes up one archive file) is "C4-". If an compressed archive
takes more than 1 file, the extension changes to "C4A" for the first and
"C`A" for the second. I do not know what the extensions will be for
compressed files taking more than two files, but CKIT does allow for an
archive to span up to 27 disks.
The header of the compressed file always starts with the string "MMS"
(with a space and $00 null termination) which stands for "Mad Man
Software", the company which makes the product.
00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F ASCII
----------------------------------------------- ----------------
0000: 4D 4D 53 20 00 58 58 21 90 89 A0 00 60 00 04 00 MMS??XX!????`?.?
0010: 00 29 5A EC 94 03 40 06 20 2F BF D5 20 B4 68 81 ?)Z??.@.?/+??+h?
0020: A0 8D 10 B4 10 AF 15 03 61 08 07 50 00 10 80 68 ??.+.?..a..P?.?h
0030: 8A 88 08 91 03 32 1A 0F B7 30 1D 94 D0 7B 28 80 ??.?.2..?0.??{(?
Byte: $0000-0004 - ASCII string "MMS " with null termination.
0005-0006 - Original Disk ID
0007-???? - Compressed data
Any other information on this format would be greatly appreciated.
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