X-pack for Executable
X-pack for Executable (not to be confused with XPACK) is a DOS executable compression utility developed by Sergey Belyakov, Jibz (see aPACK), and JauMing Tseng (see XPACK) (early versions credit "Kevin Tseng" instead). It's possible that it is also known as XE; the program filename is XE.EXE.
It compresses .EXE, .COM, some LE, and TMT/ADAM.
Its relationships to aPACK and XPACK are not completely clear. Its file signatures are similar to those of aPACK.
Format details
For DOS COM format, if the file is not compressible, XE behaves oddly. It creates an output file that is the same size as the original, but corrupted(?).
Identification
Compressed DOS EXE files apparently have ASCII signature "jmXE32" at offset 26. And they have bytes 01 00 at offset 24 (refer to MS-DOS_EXE#Special file positions), which is rare.
The executable part of compressed files can resemble aPACK, so see also aPACK#Identification.
XE-compressed DOS COM files are observed to start with one the following two byte patterns (though there might be other possibilities):
0e be 00 01 56 8b fe 8c c8 80 c4 10 8e c0 b9
be 00 01 56 bf 00 71 b9 ?? ?? fc 56 f3 a5 5f e9 ...
Software
- X-pack for Executable
- xe.zip - v1.4.5
- ANORMAL's DOSEXE collections → Executable Tools Pack → packers/x-pack.*belyakov*
- XE (X-pack for Executable), at old-dos.ru
