Data Compression History : Finnish

Finnish was perhaps the fastest (non-nop) compressor in the world around 1995 (? not sure on the exact year. Definitely before P-Pro and CMOV and branch penalties and such; this is a pre-Pentium-era optimized compressor; it definitely existed before LZP1 (1996) since it was one of the things I benchmarked against). (heck it might be a 286-era compressor, seeing as it's all 16-bit!)

Finnish was by some guys that I assume were from Finland. If anybody knows the correct attribution please let me know.

I was thinking about it the other day because we talked about the old segment register trick that we used to do, and I always thought this was such a neat little bit of code. It also uses the byte-regs as part of word-reg tricks.

Finnish :

; es = CharTable
; bx = hash index
; dl = control bits
; ds[si] = input
; ds[di] = output
; ax/al/ah = input char
; bp = control ptr

ProcessByte     macro SourceReg,BitVal
                        cmp     SourceReg, es:[bx]
                        je      ProcessByte_done
                        or      dl, BitVal
                        mov     es:[bx], SourceReg
                        mov     ds:[di], SourceReg
                        inc     di
ProcessByte_done:       mov     bh, bl
                        mov     bl, SourceReg
                        endm


ProcessBlockLoop:
                        mov bp, di           ; ControlPtr = CompPtr++;
                        inc di
                        xor dl, dl           ; Control = 0;

                        lodsw                ; AX = ds[si] , si += 2
                        ProcessByte al, 80h
                        ProcessByte ah, 40h
                        lodsw
                        ProcessByte al, 20h
                        ProcessByte ah, 10h
                        lodsw
                        ProcessByte al, 08h
                        ProcessByte ah, 04h
                        lodsw
                        ProcessByte al, 02h
                        ProcessByte ah, 01h

                        mov     ds:[bp], dl  ; *ControlPtr = Control