Pack Magic (Parsons Technology)
Pack Magic is a compression utility for DOS, developed by Parsons Technology of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Parsons Technology was founded by Bob Parsons, better known as the founder of GoDaddy.
It has two main features:
- Executable compression
- Archiving all the files in a directory (then deleting them)
For executable compression, it uses a version of AXE by SEA. This article only covers the directory archive format, which is presumably native to Pack Magic.
Discussion
A directory is archived to a pair of files named MAGIC.PCK and MAGIC.LOC. The LOC file contains only the directory's original name and location.
Ed. note: No luck getting Pack Magic to run in DOSBox or DOSBox-X. Success with 86Box and MS-DOS 6.22.
Identification
At least some PCK files start with bytes 40 e2 01 00. This is based on minimal testing, and information from IDArc.
The LOC file is just a short text file, which can't be identified.
Software
- Pack Magic v1.00: [1]
