Creatures Caves

Oh, hi there. It seems problems keep happening over here for me.

I am trying to get back in to playing the games a bit more, and my next one to get working again is C2. So far, the game itself appears to be working enough. I am more so encountering several problems with third party content. I intend to download as much as I can, for a more varied gameplay experience and file archival purposes.

Several-- if not most-- of the C2 breeds have missing or broken download links. Generally those hosted from nornenmeister's website are the ones lost to the void. If you do have these breeds, maybe stop by the Lost Download Detectives thread?
But more pressing is the problem encountered by several of the breeds I could find and download. The majority of them utilize .exe files rather than .zip files... which was convenient at one point, but now these files do not seem to work?

I tried to open them normally, met with:

Unable to open file cmac.s16.

The .s16 would suggest an image file is messed up, but I am unsure of how to go about fixing that. I checked my C2 Images folder, and that file is indeed there.
After clicking that error box closed, the installer looks like this:

I left it alone for a very long time and nothing happened. It was still listed as running in the task manager but alas, not much was going on. I tried running the .exe on a Windows XP virtual machine and the same cmac.s16 error popped up, but the loading box did not look so broken.
Additionally, if I tried to access the files without running the .exe, I was met with the error "Can not open file as archive" within 7-Zip.

At this point, I am a bit lost. Any suggestions on how to get these .exe files working or otherwise open-able? All of Amanora's breeds and those made by Kari (Spike Norns; Space Norns) are specifically the ones that use .exe's. There are more, but those are the main ones I am trying to get working at the moment. Apologies if there is something somewhere that already details how to get these files working, but I did not see anything when I manually flipped through a few pages here on the Help forum.

Thank you for any input, odds are I'll end up bugging you all again once I try to get C1 working. [nlaugh]