Amiga Software - "Decrunching"

"Decrunching"

The Amiga's floppy disk drive allowed 880 kilobytes on a single disk, which was comparable to the memory of most Amigas (usually 512 kilobytes, often 1 megabyte). In order to increase the yield, the Amiga was one of the first computers to feature the widespread use of compression/decompression techniques. Also, the disk drive had a slow transfer rate, such that using processor-based decompression could actually lead to faster loading times than loading uncompressed data from disk. Early implementations of decompression code would write rapidly varying values to a video display register, causing the screen's scan lines to break into multiple segments of colourful noise, which would become finer as the decrunching neared the end. This effect was psychedelic and very easy to implement, so it stuck; it was pioneered on the Commodore 64. The use of "decrunching" became so ubiquitous that the effect was a standard. The effect was commonly seen in pirated games or demos.