Nova Compress

File Format
Name	Nova Compress
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Compression Nova Compress
Released	≤1988

Nova Compress is a file compression utility for DOS, developed by Nova Software of Albuquerque, NM. It is a component of the Nova Utilities software collection.

It doesn't really have a name of its own, other than "Compress", but we're calling it "Nova Compress", in part due to its signature bytes.

According to the documentation, it uses Huffman coding and/or run-length encoding.

Identification

Compressed files are observed to start with bytes 0xfe 0xac, followed by ASCII "ZNOVACPR". The next character is for the compression method: "B", "H", or "R".

Software

• Nova Utilities → COMPRESS.EXE - Compresses or decompresses, depending on whether the input file is already compressed.