ARX

ARX is a compressed archive utility for DOS, and associated file format. It was developed by Michael Kosior, and released as shareware.

Format details
ARX appears to be derived from LHarc circa v1.13. Its header format is not quite compatible with LHarc/LHA format. Its compressed data format appears to be the same. It's unclear if it's supposed to have any benefits (e.g. speed) over LHarc.

Identification
More research may be needed, but ARX can probably be reliably distinguished from LHA.

ASCII "" appears at offset 2. (One might expect to see "lh0" instead of "lh1" if the first member file was not compressible, but ARX v1.0 seems to always use "lh1", possibly due to a bug.)

The byte at offset 21 has value. This normally won't happen with LHA header level 0 or 1, because that's the filename length field.

Software

 * ARX v1.0