Shrinker is a utility to assist with the compression of texture files used by Microsoft's Flight Simulator. These textures can take up many Mb of your disk space but fortunately FS5/95/98 all support a form of compressed textures. Unfortunately the only available way to compress them is with a program called ACShrink (also available for download below). ACShrink is a DOS program that compresses textures but it's rather fiddly to use when you have lots of textures to compress.

One helper application to make using ACShrink easier to use is ACShrSce, but bugs in ACShrink mean that the compressing all the textures of a particular scenery area often fails, leaving scattered extra files with truncated names lying around on your hard drive!

Shrinker works around the bugs in ACShrink and will force it to try and compress every single texture file it finds. Read the shrinker.txt file in the Shrinker archive to find out more.

I've already had reports from two users of Shrinker who have found that they saved additional space when compared to running ACShrSce alone - one saved an additional 12Mb, the other saved an additional 37Mb!

If you're flying FS98, you may want to check out the excellent free scenery for the United Kingdom available from the UK Design Team (UKDT), of which I am a member. We can be found at Magrathea. Before you spend any money on inferior commercial scenery for the UK, check ours out. We think you'll be pleased. And we know your wallet will be :-)

• Shrinker version 1.0: runs under DOS or in a Win3.1x/95/98/NT command prompt.
  Download: shrinker.zip (28,451 bytes).
• ACShrink version 1.2 by Stefan Schaefer: runs under DOS or in a Windows command prompt. If you do not already have it, you must download this too and extract it to the same folder as Shrinker.
  Download: acshrink.zip (9,895 bytes).

The whole thing is new!

Shrinker is freeware. You may not charge money for it, with one exception: if you are putting out a CD full of shareware/freeware/etc. and want to include Shrinker you may do so but on the condition that you send me a copy of the CD. Email me to get my postal address and formal permission.

You may upload Shrinker to other internet sites if you wish as long as the archive is kept exactly the same, no modifications of any kind.