TextLife
TextLife (also written TEXTLIFE or Textlife) is a DOS utility that converts a text file to an EXE file that, when executed, displays the text in a viewer. It was developed by Kevin Solway.
The source file can be more than plain text. Breeze-style control characters, and other extensions, are recognized.
The EXE format is essentially the same as that made by the Text to EXE function of Breeze. There are also some similarities to Bigtext, though not as many.
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Format details
Each version of TextLife has around a half dozen available EXE file templates, stored in abbreviated form in the "overlay" segment of the TLIFE.EXE file. The templates are all essentially the same, but with different size limits on the amount of text. The limits range from roughly 10KB to 63KB. Files made by a given version of TextLife, using a given template, are all the same size.
TextLife EXE files are constructed in such a way that they can be effectively compressed by an executable compression utility. The documentation suggests using such a utility.
Identification
More research needed.
Files made by TextLife have a 6-byte marker immediately preceding the embedded text: byte 0x05, then ASCII "ZZZZZ".
Files made by v2.6+ contain ASCII "This program was created with Textlife". Earlier files (e.g., v2.3) don't, and can't always be distinguished from those made by Breeze Text-to-EXE. Files made by TextLife v2.3, with color scheme 15, are completely identical to those made by Breeze v4.1.
Other plain text strings exist that could be useful for identification.
Software
- TextLife
- v2.3
- v2.6
- v2.7 (variant 1)
- v2.7 (variant 2): [1] → VARIOUS/SOLWAY/TLIFE/ (at DiscMaster)
- v2.7 (variant 3): [2] → FILES/TEXTTORS/TEXTLIFE/ (at DiscMaster)
See also Breeze#Software.
Sample files
- README.EXE (v2.3)
- bbs11_96.zip → *.EXE (v2.6)
- README.EXE (v2.7 var. 1)
- HATCHER.ZIP → H-README.EXE (v2.7 var. 2, LZEXE compressed)
