WinAce

» see winace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The file that finished off the ACE format was called unacev2.dll, it was last modified in 2005, and it was not shipping inside WinAce. It was shipping inside WinRAR, which had licensed the extraction library years earlier and no longer had the source for it. In February 2019 a researcher found that a malformed ACE archive could make that library write a file anywhere on disk, including the startup folder. RARLAB's fix was not to patch the library, because it could not, so it removed ACE support entirely. Roughly half a billion WinRAR installs stopped being able to read the format in one release.

The format was Marcel Lemke's, released on 22 July 1999 and bought soon after by e-merge GmbH, who shipped it as WinAce for Windows with a command-line Unace alongside for extraction. For its first couple of years the pitch was true: on a lot of real files it squeezed a bit tighter than RAR did. From version 2.65 the free build came bundled with WhenU SaveNow, an adware package, which the final release dropped in favor of an optional TrialPay offer. That final release was 2.69i on 21 January 2011, and development had already been stopped for years by then.

Here the extension was the entire encounter. Nobody around me bought an archiver, and almost nobody installed WinAce on purpose; you met ACE the same way you met any format, as three letters on the end of something you had already spent an hour pulling down a modem line, and the question was never which archiver was better but what would open the thing. The answer was usually whichever unpacker a forum thread pointed at. The program had a whole interface with a wizard and a repair tool in it, and I could not describe a single screen of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ a few percent better ~

Compression formats do not win on compression. RAR was better distributed and better supported by every tool that mattered, and it was what came out the other end when anybody packaged anything. That left ACE with a market of people who read benchmark tables. That is a small market and it does not stay loyal, because the next version of the other thing closes the gap.

The logo on the site tells you what the business had turned into. It is a blue badge with the word WinAce on it and a red banner stuck across the corner reading "Sponsored freeware", which in 2001 meant the download was free because something else came with it. That was a normal arrangement then and it is the reason a whole category of tools from those years now shows up in cleanup guides rather than in software histories.

~ the dll nobody owned ~

The archive is unusually blunt about the ending. winace.com kept serving the same HTML 4.01 frameset it had been serving since the late 1990s, three panes and a news frame, right up to 14 July 2017. By early October that year the address was answering with something else, and on 24 October it produced an ASP.NET error page that named a domain reseller's service account, which is what a lapsed registration looks like from the outside. Today winace.com is an Australian online casino affiliate site, with a review of a slots operator where the download page used to be.

So the sequence runs backwards from what you would expect. The software stopped years before the address did, and the format outlived both by sitting embedded inside a competitor's product. When that competitor removed it for safety in 2019, twenty years after the format's release, the extension went from ordinary to unopenable for most people in a single update. There are still ACE files in old download folders that now need a purpose-built tool and some patience.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »