Zoo
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Revision as of 02:54, 28 December 2023 by Dexvertbot (Talk | contribs)
Zoo is a compressed archive format developed by Rahul Dhesi. It was one of the many competing archive formats in the 1980s, and was based (originally) on LZW compression. It had some popularity with Open/VMS and Amiga systems, but didn't ultimately win out over ZIP.
Discussion
The Zoo software encompassed several different utilities, which were sometimes distributed individually, and which had their own version numbers.
- Zoo - The main program
- Ooz - Extractor
- Booz (Barebones Ooz) - Extractor; some versions can also list files
- Looz (Ooz with List) - Extract/list/execute
- Atoz - Helper utility for converting other formats (ARC, LBR) to Zoo
- Fiz - Analyze damaged Zoo files
- Stuff - File finder
- Sez - Self-Extracting Zoo utility
Compression methods
| ID | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | No packing | Uncompressed |
| 1 | LZD | LZW. A fairly generic LZW implementation, with a dynamic code size from 9 to 13 bits, and two special codes: 256=Clear, 257=Stop. |
| 2 | LZH | LZ77 Huffman. Nearly identical to LHA's "lh5" method. A small difference is that Zoo defines a way to mark the end of data. The format is pretty well documented in the comments in unzoo.c by Martin Schoenert (see below). |
Identification
Files have bytes DC A7 C4 FD at offset 20.
Zoo files typically start with "{{magic|ZOO
