Altap Salamander Support Forums

This isn't an Altap Salamander issue, but I was just hoping for some blind help with an ARJ uncompress issue.
Obviously, feel free to delete this post if that offends you. Perhaps someone reading this likes a challenge.

Any of the ARJ files at this site are uncompressable for me: http://hair.spb.ru/games/doom2/wad/
All of the other filetypes work fine; which leads me to believe that the files are not corrupt or the victim of a 7-bit ascii transfer or MIME-type conversion issue.

After some investigating, it appears that these files:
- maybe have a malformed header?
- maybe have utf-8 characters in the header when arj doesn't support that
- ARE arj files and not some other filetype erroneously named as xxxxxxxx.arj
- Were probably created with a file-manager type tool as there is data in the text header field.
- are most likely not encrypted

I have tried many different decompressor programs on Linux, Windows, and DOS6.22 with no success. Including trying unarj, open-arj, and arj version 1.00 through 2.86.
These files are quite old by modern computer terms as they were undoubtedly created before 1997 and obviously most likely in with a cyrillic character set.
http://darbinding.sourceforge.net/specs/arj.txt might be of some assistance.


thanks in advance.

Interesting problem
Arj.exe tells me those are not ARJ archives as well.
I have written to the author of that site - maybe he will explain it.

Host OS says UNIX, which is odd?
I don't seem to ever recall hearing of ARJ running on UNIX?

I do seem to recall (pretty sure it was) a .ru version of ARJ (but I'm not seeing it in my files)?

Older unarj & such I can't even run any longer (on x64 OS).

Maybe ask Robert Jung & see what he can make of them.
arjsupport@verizon.net

Thanks for the help guys.

I thnk the ru-based arj is what I need. hmm... I have a few more leads.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/a ... /util/arj/ proves partial unix support in 1994(compiles with a platform-independent C compiler).

I did inquire at the official site but with no reply (before asking here).

btw, http://homepage3.nifty.com/takeda-toshi ... index.html works great. It is a ROM(as in MAME) 16-bit emulator that enables 16-bit programs to work on a 64-bit emulated ms-dos environment(cmd.exe).
msdos.exe unarj e file.arj

I doubt that 'ru-based arj' would help here. I tried Russian NLV arj and it did not help - and the whole idea of arj is that the first 1990 version of the program should open any files created with later versions.
And as it does not - my guess is that the files just became corrupted after all these years. The author did not answer me unfortunately.

Forgive the unnecessary post, but thank you for trying. You know it's a helpful forum when they try to solve other software/people's problems.
thanks again.

Well, the author of that site has answered me - no, he can't open those archives himself now, and he does not know what is wrong with them...