XPACK

XPACK is a multi-function compression utility for DOS, probably best known for its executable compression. It was developed by JauMing Tseng.

Disambiguation

 * XPACK is not the same as X-pack for Executable (XE.EXE).


 * There is a Windows program by the same author, advertised as "XPACK-archiver for Win32", possibly named XPA or XPA32. Its relationship to the DOS XPACK software is not clear.


 * There is an unrelated collection of DOS utilities also named XPACK:

Format details
XPACK does executable compression of .EXE and .COM files.

It supports single-file compression of arbitrary data files, and has a TSR utility to do transparent decompression. Such files are presumably expected to retain their original filename.

It has an .XPA compressed archive format.

It has an .XDI compressed floppy disk image format.

Identification
At least some compressed EXE files have "" at offset 28.

Compressed data files apparently start with bytes.

.xpa archives possibly start with "".

.xdi disk images possibly start with.

Software

 * → xpack.* ...
 * → xpack.* ...
 * → xpack.* ...

Links

 * XPACK website (2001 archive)