Writing a trivial ZIP password cracker

I don't know which of the forums (compression or encription) is better
to ask this question. My Athlon 2500+ iterates about 9mln passwords
per second, which is quite slow I think. I've decided to estimate the
opportunity of applying special-purpose HW for the task. As I do not
have much time for playing with this, I'm asking anybody to direct me
to a good ZIP file format tutorial (I just need to extract
password-related information, i.e. the password's hash) and/or
provide a link to the useful libraries. The info on the
crypto-algoriths used to convert a brute-force generated pwd into a
hash for comparition will be very helpful. I'm considering this as a
university project. Thanks.

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