Today’s format has been on my list since the early days of my journey in this reverse engineering of image file formats started about a year ago. My interest in it was re-kindled by a recent comment by “RedMike” to my PIC File Format summary. The format in question is the .PAN File format from […]| Ouch my eye!
As I’ve been slowly working on getting the PIC file format code into a releasable state, another title popped up. Well not so much another title, but a rare, and nearly forgotten, version of a title. In this case it’s a 16 colour EGA specific release, while the version we’ve previously looked at was targeted […]| Ouch my eye!
Sporting pixel art graphics and a general retro aesthetic, Archrebel Tactics is a modernized take on the 1986 game Rebelstar, with MicroProse publishing.| Gaming Retro - Retro gaming news, mini consoles, and merchandise
---| The Digital Antiquarian
---| The Digital Antiquarian
Time to stop procrastinating, and distracting myself with other formats, and time to put the MicroProse PIC file format to rest – at least with what we know about it so far. This post serves to act…| Ouch my eye!
Here we go again, on yet another side quest, I didn’t mean to, but couldn’t help myself. After finishing off with the CAT file variant we saw with M1 Tank Platoon from MicroProse in my …| Ouch my eye!
We have some unfinished business with regards to the MicroProse CAT file format, it’s time to start wrapping things up. The last time when we looked at the CAT file format we determined the f…| Ouch my eye!
Once again it appears we need to realign the naming of our PIC file formats. Luckily it’s only a small one this time around, and with it we also add a new title, or rather a port of a title t…| Ouch my eye!
As summer comes to an end, it’s time to get back in the seat and start reverse engineering again. While we still have some unfinished business with several formats, I thought I’d kick t…| Ouch my eye!
Well now that the RAID data has been recovered, and a new one is up and running, we can get back to some of the regular programming around these parts. Seems with my ADD and jumping around between …| Ouch my eye!
In my last post we left of having successfully decoded the PAK and EGA image formats used by Electronic Arts with 688 Attack Sub. In this post we will reverse the process allowing us to convert an …| Ouch my eye!
Well looks like the break from the PIC file format didn’t last long. My last post we were wrapping up with the decoding of the MicroProse CAT file format when we stumbled upon what appears to…| Ouch my eye!
After practically melting my brain figuring out the LZSS compressor over the past several days, it’s time to take a break from the PIC file format for a post or two, and focus in on another f…| Ouch my eye!
With luck this will be the final post on the Bellard-LZSS compressor, allowing us to sign off on the last piece of the puzzle required to write a PIC encoder for the Railroad Tycoon Deluxe (RRDX) v…| Ouch my eye!
In my last post, we wrapped up writing our Bellard-LZSS compressor, to facilitate eventually writing a PIC93 encoder for Railroad Tycoon Deluxe (RRDX) from MicroProse. In this post we will take the…| Ouch my eye!
This post is not what I thought it would end up being about. I had plans, but it seems fate, and the dark corners of my brain, had a different path set out for me. You see after I wrapped up my las…| Ouch my eye!
Maybe not rewriting it, but correcting our recording of it. In my last post we analyzed the assets for a large number of titles from MicroProse that expanded our understanding of the sub variants a…| Ouch my eye!
Several posts back we looked at some other MicroProse titles and discovered that the PIC file format has evolved over the years with various titles. In this post we’re going to look at a few …| Ouch my eye!
I may or may not have rage quit at the end of the last post. I had spent so much time debugging and getting it working only to have this one file break everything… again! It was late, I was tired, …| Ouch my eye!
Now that we have our decoding of the PIC images up to a well-defined point for F15-SE2, it’s time to look and see where else MicroProse has used this format. As we know from the DarkLands doc…| Ouch my eye!
In a previous post, we left off having validated that all the parts we created for the pipeline required to decode a PIC file worked. While it was helpful in testing/debugging each part to have it …| Ouch my eye!
In my last post we left off with having a basic LZW decompressor up and running, now it’s time for tackling the RLERun-Length Encodingencoding of the data that the LZW comp…| Ouch my eye!
By the end of my last post we had established that the MicroProse PIC file format likely uses LZWLempel-Ziv-Welch compression, on top of RLERun-Length Encoding&nb…| Ouch my eye!
As we left off in my last entry, we had determined that the format was not the Pictor PC Paint .PIC file format as I had hypothesized. One of the first things to do is to search the Internet to see…| Ouch my eye!