The title of your post is somewhat misleading, as it's not an issue with DOSBox but rather with the archive utilities you are using. PKZip evolved over time, and earlier compression methods (Shrink, Reduce, Implode) are not supported in some modern archive programs that only support later compression methods (usually Deflate).

ripsaw8080 wrote:

(Shrink, Reduce, Implode...Deflate)

Hee, hee, have always loved these compression method identifiers 😀.

Here's a quick rundown of the sorts of compression they indicate:

• Shrink: Modified LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) compression method with partial clearing and dynamical addressing of the table entries.
• Reduce: A dictionary based algorithm used for addressing byte sequences from former contents. Finally a variable length coding is applied according to the probability distribution of the codes. This method is scalable in four steps.
• Implode: A dictionary based algorithm accessing a 4 or 8 KByte large dictionary. Sequence lengths, addresses and uncompressed symbols (optional) use Shannon Fano codes.
• Deflate: A dictionary based algorithm accessing an up to 32 KByte large dictionary. Additionally a Huffman coding will be used for redundancy reduction.

I always mass-extracted old zip archives with both WinRAR and 7-zip and never experienced many cases of decompression failure, except for actual corrupt archives.