untgz.exe (also known as untardos.exe) is one of the smallest open source decompressors available. It runs in plain real mode - no dos extenders or other fancy stuff.
See table with different targets for size comparison. The smallest variation here comes down to 13,660bytes when UPXed, 19,912bytes uncompressed.
The untardos.exe floating around on the internet gives me trouble on a 2 machines, namely a HP OmniBook 2100 with a Pentium MMX and a 386SX-25. untardos.exe simply fails with a opcode dump on these machines. This is why I recompiled everything from source and now it works.
Different targets have been created to compare size and speed.
All occurences of printf,fprintf have been replaced by puts,fputs to save space. This resulted in ~4.2k freed space.
Verbose output is not yet implemented without printf, it just prints out normally instead.
This file comes from public domain and was slightly modified to get rid of compiler warnings and a Makefile for OpenWatcom compiler was created.
The compiled exe was built for 8086 and above. Makefile has different targets with different optimizations, in case you want something different. All used optimization-switches are explained on top of makefile.
| Target | Size | RM/PM | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
all |
RM 16bit | 8086 target cpu, optimized for size (default) | |
x86small |
19912 | same as above^^ | |
x86fast |
20792 | RM 16bit | 8086 target cpu, optimized for speed |
386small |
19768 | RM 16bit | 386 target cpu, optimized for size |
386fast |
20632 | RM 16bit | 386 target cpu, optimized for speed |
486small |
19768 | RM 16bit | 486 target cpu, optimized for size |
486fast |
21032 | RM 16bit | 486 target cpu, optimized for speed |
586small |
19768 | RM 16bit | 586 target cpu, optimized for size |
586fast |
20632 | RM 16bit | 586 target cpu, optimized for speed |
dos4g_386s |
33706 | PM 32bit | 386 target CPU, stack based args, optimized for speed |
dos4g_486s |
33686 | PM 32bit | 486 target CPU, stack based args, optimized for speed |
dos4g_586s |
33686 | PM 32bit | 486 target CPU, stack based args, optimized for speed |
dos4g_386r |
33706 | PM 32bit | 386 target CPU, register based args, optimized for speed |
dos4g_486r |
33686 | PM 32bit | 486 target CPU, register based args, optimized for speed |
dos4g_586r |
33686 | PM 32bit | 486 target CPU, register based args, optimized for speed |
Size may vary if different compiler versions used. Absolute values only for demonstration/comparison of variants.
386/32bit variants also need dos4gw.exe, which needs another ~260k.
This is quite simple, every recent linux tar+gzip should work.
$ tar cvzf archive.tgz FILE1 FILE2 FOLDER1 ...
You need OpenWatcom and just execute:
$ make
$ make upx
If compiling for other sub-architectures than 8086, you should remove the --8086 switch from UPX's commandline in Makefile.
untar.c is public domain software. My contributions are public domain.