How can I extract an .ace archive? Ark does not work, so what are my options?

while it's a roundabout way of doing it, you'll find that the website http://www.winace.com/ has a command-line version of the program that works under DosBox. The only other suggestion I could make would be to try 7-Zip, which may or may not work. ACE is a proprietary compression format, and the owner (WinACE) has a lot to learn about playing friendly in the sandbox.

In all honesty, whatever it is you're trying to extract probably won't work. I haven't actually *seen* an ACE archive since 1993, and at the very least you can probably find whatever you're downloading in another format that you can already read.

I had to unace once. I searched through LQ, and found one post close to the top that had a link to a unace binary which did the job well.

See if you can find it. Search for 'unace'

I use unace and the home page is here.