Just by looking at the compressed file name, it lloks like it is for a LINUX system, and not windows.
Besides, the file inside the archive has no extension. Alias files for windows are WIRE files.
So, i think there is nothing wrong with your system. It is just that file that is not adequate for you.
Try renaming the alias file with WIRE extension. Do that by manually editing the name, and see if it opens now.
If it doest, dont worry is not your fault, and move on to something else.
Good luck!
After playing around with this for a bit I finally figured out how to render old SDL files in the latest version of Alias.
Alias used to save the SDL files as text files back in the IRIX days. Current Alias saves a SDL file as a binary file (see the explaination at the very bottom).
I knew the DNA file linked above was an SDL file because when I looked at it with a text editor It says:
"DEFINITION /* ALIAS SDL File Version 9.0 */"
doing some research I came across a utility within Alias (bsdl) that can manipulate the SDL data -it can convert SDL data to text, you can then manipulate the data, then convert it back to binary for alias then to process it.
So my idea was to open a new empty scene, export the SDL rendering info from the empty scene and replace it with the SDL info from the the old Alias SDL. It worked and here is how I did it:
1. save old SDL text file as $PATH\DNA
2. Open Alias -> new (i.e empty scene, no models, no shader info, etc - should be default setting in the text file when converting to text - easily verified with stated utility)
3. Export -> SDL (name it $PATH\empty_scene)
4. "swap" SDL info between old DNA file and new empty scene
open command prompt, cd to $PATH, enter command:
"bsdl replace DNA empty_scene"
5. create dir $PATH\pix
6. from command prompt launch powertracer
"powertracer empty_scene"
7. success!!!
from "http://www.autodesk.com/techpubs/aliasstudio/2010/index.html?url=WS73099cc142f48755-b872b1811d6c5816...
"To edit an SDL file, you must first convert it to ASCII format (text), using the Alias Binary SDL command-line utility (bsdl). This utility allows you to extract the text component from a binary SDL file, and replace the text component in a binary SDL file. This is useful if you need to hand-edit an SDL file.
SDL files now contain a binary component for large mesh files, because writing the data out as text would increase the size of the SDL file to an extent that parsing time by the renderer would also increase by a very large amount.
bsdl usage
bsdl extract [-f] <text> <binary>
Extract ASCII SDL to <text> from a binary SDL file called <binary>. The file <text> will not be overwritten unless the option -f is specified.
Any text editor can then be used to edit the <text> ASCII SDL file.
bsdl replace <text> <binary>
Insert the ASCII SDL file <text> into the binary SDL file <binary>, replacing the ASCII SDL data.
For more information on the formatting of SDL files, see SDL.html on the Technical reference page."