MLL – image compression that runs well enough on DOS

Name: MLL – image compression that runs well enough on DOS
Availability: InStock
Author: vkaku

by vkaku·Jun 10, 2026·2 points·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemCozy

From-scratch LVQ compression that actually runs on DOS with 8.3 filenames.

Strengths

•Supports six different DOS compilers including DJGPP, Borland, and Watcom.
•YUV 4:2.0 subsampling with luma-weighted training improves quality at half vector dimension.
•Resurrected 2002 university project with clean, portable C code and OpenMP parallelization.

Weaknesses

•No benchmark comparisons against JPEG, PNG, or modern codecs like AVIF.
•Limited to BMP input format with no streaming or real-time compression support.

Post Description

This is just a resurrection of my old school project, with good enough results of a variety of images.

Just opening this thread up so more people can post their bespoke compression projects. On DOS it was tested on DJGPP only. Have a plan to unroll those loops for the other ones.

I wanted to ask if other people have tried running their own formats and what they optimized for.