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DISLITE Executable file expander version 1.15 CONTENTS WARRANTY MESSAGES COPYING BUGS WHAT PRICE WHY THANKS HOW NEW LIMITS NOTE TECHS WHO WARRANTY NONE! THIS PROGRAM COMES 'AS IS'. I CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED BY THE USE OR MISUSE THIS PROGRAM. I CANNOT GUARANTEE THE FITNESS OF THIS PROGRAM FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. IF THIS PROGRAM TURNS OUT TO BEHAVE UNEXPECTEDLY OR ERRONEOUSLY, THE USER IS RESPONSIBLE, AND I CANNOT BE FORCED TO SUPPLY THE USER WITH A FIX. So, now that I have the lawyers off my back (I hope), you can forget all that capsed crap above, and read the rest of the manual, in which I promise not to shout anymore. COPYING You are free to distribute this program, provided that neither the program nor this document are changed, and the program and this document are kept together. Only a marginal fee may be asked for shipment and handling when distributing. You are not allowed to sell this program. Now that the black-market pirates are away too, we can get to business. WHAT DISLITE expands all programs compressed by PKLITE to their original image. Expanding your files has many benefits over leaving them in their compressed state. Most important, the uncompressed image can be examined by other tools, such as virus scanners. A regular virus scanner can never detect a virus embedded in a compressed file (unless by executing and checking for suspicious actions), but on the uncompressed image a much faster pattern matching algorithm can be used. Then, PKLITE compressed programs can hardly be compressed any further using "regular" file compressors like UC2, ARJ. The uncompressed files however, usually compress quite well using these products, and normally the result of compressing the original file is better than that achieved when first compressing with PKLITE, and then with another compression utility. (Though not always) The same argument usually holds if you are using products like Stacker or SpeedStor to enlarge your disk, which could be considered as compression utilities on-the-fly. It would be silly to have a second, almost useless, compression slowing down your system. In a similar context can be mentioned that some people prefer other executable processors, such as DIET, to recompress the files. Then there is an increase in execution speed of uncompressed files, because the uncompression is no longer needed before execution. This may, on the other hand, not be true on fast machines with slow drives. In these circumstances the compressed file might actually execute quicker because there is less disk access. Finally, for the compression-hunters, there are a few extra's in this program that lets you strip unnecessary information off of the executables, making it a tad smaller. WHY You could ask why this separate program is necessary, as PKLITE has the -x option to "extract" (I'd rather call it uncompress) a compressed files. The answer is simple. There is also an option in the commercial version of PKLITE to generate "unextractable" files (-e). Needless to say there are numerous programs available nowadays in this "unextractable" format. Also, with almost minimal effort it is quite easy to modify a PKLITE compressed file in such a way that "PKLITE -x" cannot handle it anymore. There are even tools around that do exactly this. DISLITE has the capability of expanding both "unextractable" files and slightly modified files to their original image. Notice that CHK4LITE that comes with PKLITE is also not able to recognise modified PKLITE compressed files. Use "DISLITE -l" to determine if a file is compressed by PKLITE or not. See the HOW section for info on the -l option. You should NOT use DISLITE to undo an erroneous "PKLITE -e" done on your recently compiled fantastic program, to do a binary compare with the latest version of your fantastic program. To make a binary compare all parts of the executable have to be restored exactly as they were, and the "PKLITE -e" process throws some information away that is subsequently lost. Needless to say the information lost during extra compression is not important to run your program. HOW Usage of DISLITE is very simple. Just type: > DISLITE file to decompress the executable file.EXE or file.COM in the current directory. You can also specify two filenames in which case the first file is left intact and the decompressed program is written to the second filename. If you type DISLITE without any parameters, the following help screen appears to remind you of the possible options: Usage: DISLITE [options] [d:][\path]Infile [[d:][\path]Outfile] Options are: -b = make backup .BAK file of original -cN = N is max number of segments -e = extract unextractable file (*) -f = un-do the fixup optimizations done by HDROPT & `extra` -h = remove irrelevant header data -k = omit kludge code added on some files -l = only list version info -o = overwrite output file if it exists -p = align text data on a page -r = remove overlay data -s = silent, do not generate any warnings -u = update file time/date to current time/date -v = verbose In fact the options can appear anywhere on the command line, not just directly after the program name. Options can always be combined, so "-b -v -h" can be abbreviated as "-bvh". You can also use the switch character (usually '/', but it could be set to anything) as the option indicator. In case you use '/', the program tries to be smart and figures out whether you mean a filename or indeed an option (since you can use the '/' character as a directory separator too). In case of difficulty, use '-' and '\'. (More specific: DISLITE will only recognise an option initiated with '/' as option if every following character is a valid option.) A short description of all possible options follows: -b This option makes a backup of the compressed file image, which has the same name and path as the Infile, but the extension .BAK. Any existing file with that name will automatically be overwritten. -c This option sets the maximum number of segments in a compressed program that DISLITE can handle. Notice that running out of segments only produces a warning or two. If memory is short, reducing the number of segments increases the amount of fixups DISLITE can handle. (It is essential that there is enough memory for fixups). If you are combining options, the c option should always be the last letter in a sequence. You can put the number either directly after the 'c' or separate them with a space. -e This option is completly ignored by the program. Use it to your hearts contents to spell interesting words using the option letters. You might find "DISLITE -less" easier to remember than "DISLITE -ls" to which it is otherwise functionally the same. Notice that most option letters have no effect when you specify them more than once. -f This option undoes the effect of "HDROPT", and also the optimization done by "PKLITE -e" extra compression, which is the same. The fixups are rearranged such that they become relative to the observed segments in the executable. This is automatically done for extra compressed files. -h Most linkers include in the exe file header some information that is not needed for program execution in any way, information that might be used by a debugger later. Use this option to remove that information from the executable. (For the technically gifted: the information between the end of the documented DOS header, and the start of the relocation table. PKLITE ignores all information after the relocation table in the header, so that is lost forever after using any PKLITE compression method.) Note that this option has no effect on .COM files as they have no exe header, and neither on extra-compressed files, as the extra header data is then removed by PKLITE on compression. -k Files compressed using PKLITE version 1.15 extra compression or higher, set a word in memory during decompression, so the compressed program can check if it was running compressed. If DISLITE detects this, it automatically inserts code to mimic the behaviour of the PKLITE decompression, adding 4 to 11 bytes of code to the program, depending on some program properties. If you don't want this kludge code to be automatically added, specify this option. IMPORTANT! If you decompress PKZIP 2.04g using the -k switch, then the resulting PKZIP executable will CAUSE DAMAGE TO YOUR FILES if you run it! Be aware! -l Only list the version of PKLITE that compressed the file, don't decompress anything. This is especially useful with the '-s' option because DISLITE outputs one single line for a file in that case. None of the other options have any effect with the -l option. -o Use this option to overwrite an output file that already exists. Note that files with extensions .BAK and .$$$ with the name of the Infile are always overwritten (provided these files are generated by the program. You normally never see .$$$ but this is used as an interim file in case you only specify an Infile). -p Align text data on a page. This option can be used for any .EXE file, to make the exe header a multiple of 512 bytes. Some say that the executable loads faster if this is the case. Most linkers generate executables this way. -r Remove any overlay data present. Overlay data is data after the executable file image until the physical end of file. DISLITE never complains when overlays are present, it normally just copies the overlays. -s Be silent. No warnings are given, and the header is suppressed too. Usefull for background or batch execution. -u Update time. Use this option to set the file date/time stamp to the current time. Normally, DISLITE leaves the file date/time of the file the same (even when you specify an Outfile). -v Be verbose. When you use this option, you will get a more detailed progress indicator, and lots and lots of information about the file being uncompressed. Recommended to the nosey. LIMITS DISLITE uses quite a lot of memory. I haven't exactly calculated it, but I expect you need approximately 150K + the amount the expanded program takes to execute. In case you have not enough memory available, DISLITE will first try to shrink its buffers a little (upto a certain point), but this can lead to errors like "Too many fixups, sorry". DISLITE can only handle executables with upto 16384 fixups. If you find a file with more fixups, asking me nicely to provide a new version of DISLITE might help. The program uses the built-in extractor of the executable, and therefore a very smart virus can get hold of your system if you expand a compressed file which had a virus infecting it after compression. But since DISLITE disallows DOS and BIOS access for the expanding program, the chances that you actually catch a virus that infected a compressed file are much larger. See the TECHS section for more info. The "effective compression" ratio as described under MESSAGES can give odd or incorrect results if you specify one of the -hpr options. TECHS As said in the previous section, DISLITE uses the extractor built into the compressed file to decompress it. There is a little debugger inside DISLITE that allows it to only execute the built-in decompressor and extract information from it at the same time. But because DISLITE is still based on particular details about the built-in decompressor, there can always be ways around it. Therefore I do not guarantee that DISLITE will work for future version of PKLITE. Nevertheless, DISLITE has been thoroughly tested on files generated by PKLITE versions 1.03 - 1.15, and also works for the 1.20 compressed files that are available. When debugging the program that is decompressed, DOS and BIOS interrupts are disabled. But in case such an interrupt is called anyway, DISLITE displays the offending interrupt number and follows with a dump of all internal registers. This might indicate several things: If you had previous warnings about an unrecognised PKLITE version, that is likely to be cause of the troubles. If you haven't, someone might have modified the compressed program. This modification could have been done by the original programmer on purpose, or, as a final case, by a virus. .COM files are always extracted to their original image, and so are normal compressed .EXE files. (Well, at least restored just as PKLITE -x would restore them. If there was any information stored after the relocation table, that is lost.) Extra compressed .EXE files can not be restored to their original image exactly. As said before, the information stored in the header just after the DOS documented .EXE header and before the relocation table cannot be recovered. This information is not needed anyway. Further, there are 3 entries in the .EXE header that can not be recovered completely. Two of these, the headersize and the position of the relocation table follow from the fact that the additional header data is lost. The third entry that can not be completely recovered is the minimum memory to allocate to the program. This value might be a little bigger in the newly extracted image as compared to the original one. In case you have such a critical memory setup that the program cannot execute with this larger minimum memory requirement, it wouldn't have done so *with* the PKLITE decompression code either. Resuming, this is again not a great loss. However, DISLITE is very well able to *completely* restore the relocation or fixup table. In fact DISLITE goes through some trouble finding the right segment for each fixup, as PKLITE -e kindly throws that information away. However, if there isn't enough memory to store the segments used in the compressed program, then the fixups aren't restored completely. This doesn't have any impact on the execution of the program. MESSAGES Many! DISLITE is stuffed to under its chin with all kinds of information messages, most of which are self-explanatory. I will, however, name some. There are four types of messages DISLITE can produce: informational, harmless warnings, warnings, and errors. Informational messages are enabled with the -v option. They include: progress indicators, and various file information. There are two compression ratio's mentioned for .EXE files: the real compression and the effective compression. The real compression is the compression of text (executable) data, as achieved by the PKLITE algorithms, and the effective compression is the file-to-file overall compression factor, the one that PKLITE displays. This latter value might not be correct in all circumstances. See the LIMITS section. Harmless warnings are indications that something isn't going as it should, but the decompression process isn't seriously hindered by it. The only harmless warning that you might react upon is: Harmless warning: Fixup segments don't match observed segments. You might use '-f' to correct this. This might be the result of a program that is first processed with HDROPT and then compressed using normal compression. If you specify the -f switch, as indicated, then both the compression *and* the optimizations done by HDROPT are undone. The harmless warning "Cannot fix fixups" indicates that there wasn't enough memory to store all segments found in the program, and as a result the fixups cannot be restored completely. A warning is given if DISLITE has serious doubts about the program you want to uncompress. For example if you specified a file without an executable extension. You are asked to confirm before proceeding. Setting -s inhibits all warning messages. There are innumerable errors, mostly DOS errors of the format "short explanation:DOS error description". These are all of the type "get your dirty hands off that disk drive door and retry". DISLITE can't do much about it. There are some DISLITE specific errors, like "Cannot find end of decode loop."; or "Unexpected interrupt xxh from processed program.", followed by a dump of all CPU registers; or "Not enough memory." or "Too many fixups, sorry." This all means that DISLITE can no longer keep track of what's happening, and gives up. Increasing the memory available to DISLITE might help. If it doesn't, blame PKWARE for bringing out an incompatible version of PKLITE. (And start looking for an updated DISLITE :-) The only likely error is that of an unexpected exit from the compressed program, which normally means you pressed Ctrl-Break. You cannot turn off the errors or stop them from aborting the program. BUGS Well I've eliminated the One remaining bug in DISLITE v 1.01 :), but there is a slight change that the enhancements might have incorporated new bugs. If you find something that shouldn't occur according to you, you're free to send me a mail (see WHO section below). PRICE Zero! Give this away to all your friends, especially if their initials are PK ;-) But of course donations are greatly appreciated. See the WHO section below to know where to send your money. THANKS Special thanks to CV-Tassle for upgrading DISLITE to be able to handle 1.14+ compressed files and for various other functions and bugfixes. Also thanks to Nico for getting the bugs out of the manual (old credit that still had to be paid). And last but not least, thanks to Sabine for being so patient with me. NEW New in version 1.15 is the ability to deal with 1.14 and 1.15 compressed files, and with the PKLITE 1.20 extra compressed programs that were available. All undocumented options of v. 1.01 have changed. I don't think that anybody will regret the loss of -l for the new functionality :) -c changed because what it orginally served was no longer useful; "crippled" files are now automatically handled properly. The -d option disappeared as it was unsafe to use. Fixed a bug reporting out of memory while processing fixups. Added a progress indicator that provides for some entertainment while you await the decompression process. Greatly enhanced detection of PKLITEd executables! Even if the "PKLITE" indentification string is removed, DISLITE is still able to tell if an executable is compressed by PKLITE. Output files are no longer silently overwritten. NOTE A note to people who are concerned about DISLITE removing the PKLITE -e "protection" from a program: As a software developer, if you want to make your programs tamper-proof, you should not rely on any single method, and certainly not on anything so easy to circumvent (and so widespread) as PKLITE -e. Any good cracker can undo the PKLITE compression with a debugger in a few minutes. The best protection is to be creative. Checksumming the executable in a complicated way and using the result to initialise some variables could be a nice suggestion. Make sure your program does lots of other things preferably with a lot of procedure calls before the actual check appears. There's nothing so easy as skipping the first procedure call. Three notes from the developers of DISLITE to all evil people out there: Note to would-be crackers of PKZIP 2.04: In addition to the PKLITE compression (which DISLITE 1.15 will expand), there is internal encryption of portions of the code within the executables. DISLITE 1.15 does not concern itself with this. If you want to crack the PKZIP internals, you are on your own. Forget it--Get a life! Note to any crackers of any software: If you really need DISLITE to get around the PKLITE compression, then you're obviously no-good! Why are you wasting your time on this anyway, don't you have something better to do? If you are such a genuis on the keyboard as you keep saying to yourself, why don't you write a useful program? Note to would-be defeaters of DISLITE: Forget it. We can always figure out how to expand it. If the processor can expand it at run time, then some program can expand it too. Your last attempt was valiant, and only worked as long as it did because we had other demands on our time. However, you have our admiration for such a fine program as PKLITE. WHO I can be reached: Jan-Pieter Cornet Aletta Jacobsstraat 8 2642 AD Pijnacker Netherlands phone: +31 1736 98480 Email: cornet@duteca.et.tudelft.nl or ba132@cleveland.freenet.edu DISLITE (pd) Executable File Expander Version 1.15 Apr 2, 1993 Copyleft 1991-1993 JohnPC & CV-Tassle. Say NO! to software patents.