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- {
- GUY MCLOUGHLIN
-
- >I wanted to ask you... would you happen to know how a CRC Check-sum
- >works? Everytime I go to look this up in a book I see a bunch of
- >stuff about X^7 + X^12 + X^17..... (and on and on) but nothing that
- >actually says "Here's what the code looks like" ... just a bunch of
- >non-sensical bull...Would you happen to know the algorithm that is
- >used?
-
- ...Greg Vigneault is much better at this stuff than I am. I
- usually know "why" something works, but not always "how". <g>
- The basic idea is that the data is treated as input to a specific
- polynomial equation (ie: X^32 + X^26 + X^23 + X^22 + X^16 + X^12),
- the result of this is then divided by a specific prime number, and
- the remainder left over is the CRC value. I know that this is
- easier said than understood, but that's the gist of it.
-
- ...if a single bit of a chunk of data is changed, the chances
- are very good that a CRC check number would catch this change.
- It's not 100 percent guaranteed, but something more like 99.97
- percent, so CRCs are not an entirely bulletproof check. Here's
- a standard Pascal Implementation of a CRC-16 routine:
- }
-
- Function CRC16(InString: String) : Word;
- Var
- CRC : Word;
- Index1,
- Index2 : Byte;
- begin
- CRC := 0;
- For Index1 := 1 to length(S) do
- begin
- CRC := (CRC xor (ord(InString[Index1]) SHL 8));
- For Index2 := 1 to 8 do
- if ((CRC and $8000) <> 0) then
- CRC := ((CRC SHL 1) xor $1021)
- else
- CRC := (CRC SHL 1)
- end;
- CRC16 := (CRC and $FFFF)
- end;
-