ByteBoozer
A C64 cruncher built for speed: the decrunch is fast enough to run in the middle of a demo without stalling.
Written by HCL of the group Booze Design, the cruncher caught on precisely where speed matters — an effect unpacked between two frames can't take too long. The compression is good but not best in class; the point is the balance between size and a decruncher that is short and blisteringly fast.
Where Exomizer and Pucrunch squeeze out the last byte at the cost of slower unpacking, many coders reached for ByteBoozer when the code was going to run straight away anyway. ByteBoozer 2 tightened the ratio further. The choice between crunchers is always the same bargain: a few bytes less on disk against a few rasters more at unpack time.