PocketMatrix

I have been using UPX for my different projects on the PC for the past few years. Now that I have a project for the PocketPC I would like to compact the .exe the same way.

Are there any tools that will do this for the PocketPC executable files?

If not, anyone would be interested in allowing UPX to support WinCE's PE? The source codes for UPX are available.

I was talking about compressing the .exe using a compression algorythm that uncompresses it at load time into memory. A 600k .exe can be compressed to 170k easily with a good compression, and when you run it, it is uncompressed to memory and ran.

Take a look at Upx.

This was discussed a number of years ago here at PM. I'm pretty sure I posted the results of some informal testing regarding this compression. zlib can make files smaller than they would be otherwise, because the OS uses a faster / less efficient algorithm.

Dan East

I tried searching for my post that showed how much files were compressed by the OS, but all I found was this:
http://www.pocketmatrix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5898

Dan East

I looked at virtually every PE compressor at one point a while back and turned up nothing... So, I suspect you'll be writing your own (or updating UPX or similar) yourself.

It should be noted that *compression* might not be the goal here, as it frankly was not for me... Back in the pre-Windows days, there was a considerable amount you could do to make an EXE very difficult on crackers... Similar tricks can be played with PE's, although perhaps not quite as successfully.

A great story I have about this (well, great to me anyway)... when I took my Assembly class some years ago, our final was to create a program that the teacher could not crack... it was a simple program... enter a password and have a message displayed... it had to be self-contained, and so contain the password itself, and there could be only one real password... he was exceptionally good at defeating all sorts of executable protection schemes (one might ask why he was so good, and why he felt this made a good final project, but I digress)... in something like 20 years of teaching, he never had a student present him something he couldn't crack in under a week (had a couple that took a few days, most were a few hours at most)... until he met me... I coded the program in about the most obtuse and crazy ways I could think of so that even if he had the actual source in front of him it would be tough to figure out the password... THEN I ran it through 6 different EXE encryptors, compressors, etc. The end result is that it took him something like EIGHT MONTHS to finally crack it, and it was only after figuring out what I had done (and after my A in the class was long since in the books!). Incidentally, it took him 9 hours he said AFTER he got it to a completely unprotected form, so my obtusde coding would have earned me an A anyway!

IIRC, it's transparent compression, like software compression on the desktop... if won't tell you what the compressed size is, it'll still report the "real" size... although you can see both on the desktop, I guess you can't (without some 3rd-party tool any) on a PPC.

That's my recollection anyway... anyone else remember for certain?