LArc

LArc (not to be confused with LHarc) is a compressed archiver program for DOS. It was developed by Kazuhiko Miki, with Haruhiko Okumura and Ken Masuyama. Its native file format is sometimes called LZS. It uses generalized LHA format, and was possibly the originator of it. It was based in part on Okumura's LZSS software.

See LHA for more information relevant to LArc format.

Identification
One of the listed 5-character LArc compression scheme IDs appears at offset 2.

Identification of self-extracting archives
LArc (v3.33, at least) can create self-extracting archives in either COM or EXE format (depending on the archive size, apparently). The ASCII substring "" appears at offset 32 for EXE format, or offset 526 for COM format.

Software

 * (1989-02-25)
 * LArc v3.33-Japanese: FM Towns Free Software Collection 1 → FREEWARE.{BIN,CUE} → ms_dos/larc/ (or )
 * lhasa
 * LHa for Unix
 * Some of the software listed at LHA supports LArc format.

(Wanted: Other versions of LArc.)