Micrognosis Compression Archiver
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Micrognosis Compression Archiver, sometimes called MAR, is a compressed archive utility for DOS (and maybe other platforms?).
The software is a bit vague about who exactly is responsible for it. No doubt Haruhiko Okumura had a lot to do with it, but it would be nice to have independent confirmation of a connection between him and Micrognosis. The credits for version 1.0 say:
Original Version By: Stratus VOS 11.5 Version by: Haruhiko Okumura Richard Schiller
Format details
MAR uses generalized LHA format, with some custom compression schemes:
| ID | Description and remarks |
|---|---|
-hf0- |
Generic Huffman |
-ah0- |
Adaptive Huffman |
-ari- |
Arithmetic |
It also uses the standard "lh0" scheme, for uncompressed files.
The documentation lists more compression schemes, but they don't seem to be implemented:
| ID | Description and remarks |
|---|---|
-arn- |
Arithmetic N |
-lzs- |
LZS IDX-12,13,14/LEN-3,4,5. (Don't know if this was intended to be the same as LArc's scheme of the same ID.) |
-lzw- |
LZW BIT-12,13,14/LZW-fix,var |
Identifiers
The executable file is named "MAR.EXE". MAR does not seem to have a standard filename extension, though one might logically use .MAR.
