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Unpack those .EXE game files from GOG.com (Plus other un-packers)

I just came upon innoextract today. I have many of the wonderful games from GOG.com, some of which have native Linux Clients. Before now, I've had to use PlayOnLinux or Crossover to install these for use with WINE, then add the Linux client.

InnoSetup as a way to create an installer to install the games on Windows. Daniel Scharrer has created innoextract to allow the unpacking of those archives on a non-Windows platform.

The website provides information on using innoextract, but this information from the page is very useful:
GOG.com Installers
GOG.com installers with a 2.x.x version number on the download page or in the filename use InnoSetup 5.5.0 and cannot be extracted by innoextract 1.2 and older. Older installers use InnoSetup 5.2.3 and usually have no version in the filename.
Some GOG.com multi-part installers with version 2.1.x or higher use RAR archives (renamed to .bin) to store the game data. These files are not part of the InnoSetup installer and require unrar or unar to be installed, as well as  innoextract 1.5 or newer and use of the --gog option.

A Windows only version of innoextract has more features tyhan teh Linux version; it is also Open Source.

MORE ARCHIVE UNPACKERS

1. unshield can be used to extract cab files from InstallShield installers and cabextract can be used to extract files from cab files.

2. fsarchiver is a system tool that allows you to save the contents of a file-system to a compressed archive file. The file-system can be restored on a partition which has a different size and it can be restored on a different file-system. Unlike tar/dar, FSArchiver also creates the file-system when it extracts the data to partitions. Everything is checksummed in the archive in order to protect the data. If the archive is corrupt, you just loose the current file, not the whole archive.

3. makeself is a packaging tool used to make automatic installers. It is a small shell script that generates a self-extractable compressed tar archive from a directory. The resulting file appears as a shell script (many of those have a .run suffix), and can be launched as is. Here's a HOWTO.

4. With UT2003 update 2199, a umod unpacker function was included with Unreal Tournament 2003.
Added a "umodunpack" commandlet to ucc, to extract ut2mod files.
   Usage:
     to extract:
      ./ucc-bin umodunpack -x file.ut2mod -nohomedir
     to list contents of file.
      ./ucc-bin umodunpack -l file.ut2mod -nohomedir
5. Microsoft .msi files can be unpacked using 7zip, but 7zip cannot de-compile the data files, so it maybe not of much use. lessmsi can be used to extract files from .msi files.  msitools can be used to inspect and build Windows Installer (.msi) files.


Comments

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