Introduction

InstallShield 3 archive (*.z) extractor written from scratch. It has the following features stix does not:

• It is not an MS-DOS program written in Pascal (and German)
• It does not contain dubious X86 assembly code probably taken from some proprietary software
• It supports more archive format including multi volume archives

The decompression is done by Mark Adler's blast, a clean-room implementation of the PKWare Compression Library.

Usage

isdecomp [-l][-x [-d DIR]][-t] file.z [files...]

• -l
  List files
• -x
  Extract files
• -d DIR
  Extract files into the specified folder. Use with -x
• -t
  Test archive

Build

1. If your Visual C++ doesn't have stdint.h, go get it
2. Run make (gcc) or nmake /f Makefile.vc (cl)

API

TBA.

Compatibility

Tested with the following systems.

• WDK 7.1.0 (cl.exe 15.00.30729.207) on Windows 10
• gcc 5.4.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Todos

• Support multi-volume archives
• Support self-extracting archives
• Support encrypted archives (?)
• Test on a big-endian system (I don't have one)
• Test with cl.exe /analyze

License

Anything other than blast.c and blast.h is released under the WTFPL.

Acknowledgements

• stix by Veit Kannegieser
• blast by Mark Adler, found in the zlib source code
• The format specification of the PKWare Compression Library by Ben Rudiak-Gould
• The file list (-l option) is visually similar to 7-zip by Igor Pavlov

See also

• Unshield can extract InstallShield 5 CAB files
• Universal Extractor contains the proprietary i3comp.exe that can compress and decompress InstallShield 3 archive files