I'm working on a game for Amiga (another 68k-based platform) and settled on ZX0 to decompress assets on the fly: <a href="https://github.com/einar-saukas/ZX0">https://github.com/einar-saukas/ZX0</a><p>I was originally using LZ4, but I switched to ZX0 after learning that it can do in-place decompression, which means I don't have to allocate separate memory for the compressed data. I'm very happy with the compression ratio, and decompression of large assets (~48kb) only takes a few frames on a 7MHz 68000.<p>Also of note is LZ4W, included in Sega Genesis Dev Kit (and discussed in the comments section of OP's article), a variant of LZ4 that only uses word-aligned operations. That makes it much faster on the 68000, which can struggle to efficiently handle 8-bit data. More info here: <a href="https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/blob/master/bin/lz4w.txt">https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/blob/master/bin/lz4w.txt</a>
In “faster than memcpy” series we have also Blosch for modern CPUs<p><a href="https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/" rel="nofollow">https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/</a><p>I have never been able to use Blosch myself. But it sounds really interesting, outperforming RAM. Not sure what are the applications - columnar data processing, Parquet files, etc?