I''m building a PAK reader/writer (can only read and execute from a pak archive at the moment) for myself with a WinZip type interface.

http://www.voxelsoft.com/dev/pakview.zip

See if you like it. If you do, I''ll write it up tomorrow and you can register it for $10, Ok? (j/k) No, really I''ll put it out for free download next week

I used to code in DJGPP and I used allegro as my graphics library. It had a .dat system that held images, sounds, text, anything actually and had it compressed pretty well. I forgot the url for allegro but you can follow some link there from www.delorie.com (where you get djgpp). Im currently going to use this .dat system on my next project.