UnshieldV3
C++ code and simple CLI tool for reading InstallShield V3 (Z) archives.
About InstallShield v3 (Z) archives
InstallShield Z format is a compressed archive format used by version 3 of the InstallShield installation software.
Files begin with bytes 13 5D 65 8C 3A 01 02 00.
It uses the proprietary "implode" compression algorithm by PKware. Beware that PKware used the term "implode" for various algorithms.
Usage
Compile with qmake and GCC 7 or later.
./unshieldv3 list ARCHIVE.Z
./unshieldv3 extract ARCHIVE.Z DESTINATION/
History / Credits
ICOMP95.EXE is the original proprietary (de)compressor.
Veit Kannegieser reverse-engineered the file format and implemented an extractor called "stix", written in a mixture of Pascal and x86 Assembly.
Mark Adler reverse-engineered the compression algorithm, and provided a clean C implementation as part of zlib/contrib.
baxtor reverse-engineered the original Pascal code for the OpenRA project.
See also
Later InstallShield archives can be extracted with Unshield.
OmniBlade implemented a very similar program years ago, which I was not aware of: https://github.com/OmniBlade/isextract
Authors
Wolfgang Frisch