Shareware Extractor

A standalone Go package that extracts pak0.pak directly from the original id Software Quake 1.06 shareware distribution (quake106.zip). On first run, if no game data exists, Nexus downloads quake106.zip and uses this package to extract a verified pak0.pak file into id1/.

How It Works

The original shareware archive uses a deprecated, multi-part LHA-compressed installer format from 1996. This package implements LZH (LH5) decompression from scratch in pure Go (no cgo, no external binaries, no shell calls) to decompress the resource.1 segment and extract the PAK file and license text.

Every step is SHA256-verified: the zip file itself, the resource.1 entry, and the extracted pak0.pak. If any hash does not match the known-good value, extraction fails. This verification process serves two purposes:

Correctness. The engine expects specific file layouts. A corrupted or modified PAK causes subtle gameplay issues or crashes.
License compliance. id Software's shareware license permits redistribution of the original, unmodified archive only. The extraction pipeline allows NexQuake to get up and running with minimal user effort while still complying with that license.

LZH Lineage

The LZH decoding logic is derived from koron-go/lha (MIT licensed), heavily modified and optimized specifically for Quake 1.06 resource extraction. See ATTRIBUTIONS.md for full provenance.

Shareware Sources

https://github.com/0xBrsm/QuakeAssets/blob/main/q1/quake106.zip
https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive/blob/main/bin/quake106.zip
https://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake/quake106.zip