Pro-Pack

Revision as of 05:14, 28 December 2023

PROPACK (spelled PRO-PACK in some versions, and also known as RNC compression) is multi-function data compression utility that was used by several commercial games. It was developed by Rob Northen (frequently misspelled "Northern"), who also produced the Rob Northen copylock (Wikipedia article) copy protection scheme.

Binary versions of the software were available for at least Amiga and IBM PC (DOS). Decompression routines written in assembly language were provided for 680x0 processors (Amiga, Atari ST, Megadrive), 80x86 (IBM PC), 65c816 (SNES) and 65C02 (Atari Lynx).

Its native formats include a compressed file format, a compressed archive format (at least in v2.14+), and various executable compression formats. Supported executable formats include Amiga Hunk, DOS EXE (compressed to EXE), DOS COM (compressed to COM), Atari ST TOS, MC68000, and Atari Lynx executables.

Identification

ProPack data files begin with ASCII "RNC", followed by an 0x01 or 0x02 byte to indicate the compression method used.

ProPack archive files begin with ASCII "RNCA".

Compressed executable formats: (TODO).

Format documentation

• Reverse-engineered data format from Sega Retro
• MultimediaWiki article

Software

• RNC_ProPack.lha - includes the original compressor for IBM PC and Amiga, all the decompression routines mentioned above, plus a MIPS R4300 version for the Nintendo 64 and a Z80 version for the GameBoy
• ANORMAL's DOSEXE collections → DOSEXE Executable Tools Pack → packers/propack.* (has 2.08, 2.14, 2.19)
• Various versions, at old-dos.ru
• Pro-Pack compressor and decompressor written in C
• Ancient

Ed. note: The command-line utility's syntax is challenging to figure out, unforgiving, and different in different versions.

Sample files

• dexvert samples — archive/rnc