Bundling a program and external files into a single executable?

Question

This question is kinda similar to this one, but not exactly. I have a game engine in C#, and I'm working with some people who want to use my engine. Originally I designed the engine so that all the assets are external - non programmers can create art, music, xml settings, etc. and that anyone could modify an existing game, and share them amongst each other. Basically the whole thing including the engine itself is open source.

The group I'm working with (one of only two projects using my engine currently) wants to close their assets so they can't be modified. Although it's against my principle, I don't want to turn them away, both because I've already been working with them a while and because the market is very small (both for engines like mine, and for users of those engines).

The Actual Question

Is there a way, maybe some available software, that can take an exe and a bunch of other arbitrary files, and smash them into a single exe, that isn't just an archive? I would like the final exe to behave like it runs the first exe with some command line parameters that refer to the bundled files. For example, running bundle.exe would be just like running original.exe --project_path=/project but the project files are inside the bundle, and cannot be retrieved from it.

My original exe is written in C#. I doubt that matters.

Answer 1

You could pack these files as embedded resources.