One of the dark corners of ZIP file format is the “multi-segment” archive feature. By “multi-segment archive”, I mean to include the disk spanning features intended for flop…| Entropymine
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!
Stardate -298165.9: As is often the case, new adventures in reverse engineering are inspired by random comments that I stumble across. I was enjoying a lazy Sunday when I stumbled across this in one of the groups I participate in. The “request” (it wasn’t directed at me specifically) comes as a result of the release […]| Ouch my eye!
In my last post we took on the .RES Container File format from Nova Logic. In that post I mentioned that there was a 2nd variant of the format that we see with “F-22 Lightning II” (1996) from Nova Logic. While working on the original format we found with “Comanche 3”, I took a quick […]| Ouch my eye!
It all started so innocently. I’ve been away from the scene for a while so I was catching up on some chat history on one of the modding/gaming servers on Discord that I’m on and I stumbled across the following. Well we can’t have that now, can we? I’ll take that as a sign for […]| 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!
PagePerfect: the Promise of Desktop Publishing Realized| Obsolete Thor
Most of what you will find on this blog is file format identification. I see this as the first step in a longer process of preservation and ultimately access. Hopefully the analysis of some file formats can help make better decisions when needing to render the file in an emulator or migrate to another format. I don’t spend much time trying to parse the files I look at to understand the actual content, just enough to properly identify and differentiate between important versions of the format. | Obsolete Thor
I recently was able to image a few Bernoulli Disks for a collection using a SCSI device I have found quite useful. The disks had been sitting around for quite some time waiting for the right tools and resources to extract the contents. I mentioned the accomplishment to a few coworkers and one asked me if I would extract the contents from their old disk they used for school back in the 1990’s. They had spent a whopping $99 at the local bookstore for a disk which held a total of 150MB. Not GB...| Obsolete Thor
This post is part of a series. For an introduction to the file command, and the other posts in the series, see the first post. When writing a “magic pattern” file for the file command, …| Entropymine
If you have been following previous posts about Floppy disk flux captures, you may have read about the HFE or A2R flux image formats. Both very useful in the preservation, archiving and emulation of old software and games stored on decaying and copy-protected floppy disks. I also built a Fluxengine which has come in handyRead more| Obsolete Thor
Let’s talk about the DVD format for a minute. Specifically the miniDVD media format. | Obsolete Thor
This post attempts to explain a few things about how the file command deals with binary vs. text files, primarily from the standpoint of someone writing “magic patterns” for it. For an …| Entropymine
A previous post was about LUTs, the little files needed to color grade your photo’s and video’s. One of the best systems for color grading video in use by professionals today is DaVinci Resolve. The system originally was all hardware based, but in the 2004 as computers were able to process higher quality video, da Vinci Systems released new digital systems.| Obsolete Thor
This post is part of a series on PKLITE executable compression format. For a list of all the posts, see the first post. Until recently, the only pre-v1.00 beta version of PKLITE that I had a copy o…| Entropymine
Word Processors are everywhere and have some of the most recognizable file formats. Some are very simple in that they just contain plain text, others are more complex. There are formats which allow for images and others which can handle different languages and writing directions.| Obsolete Thor
EXEPACK is an old executable file compressor for MS-DOS EXE files. It was made by Microsoft, and distributed with their software development kits. Sometimes, EXEPACK was in the form of an independe…| Entropymine
If you are looking for LUTs, you’re in luck. There is a website for sharing your FreshLUTs. Even though they are fresh, they are probably not as exciting as one might think.| Obsolete Thor
There’s an item in the Internet Archive’s software collection, which someone uploaded and named “EPS CD 2 German 1994”. It contains a few hundred .EXE files, organized in a …| Entropymine
Not to be confused with Fantasia, a magical screen recording tool has been around for many years. Books have been written on the use of this software to instruct others on how to teach and demonstrate other software and ideas. | Obsolete Thor
Over a decade ago, I wrote a blog post about WorldEditor's file format design and, in particular, why I didn't reuse the serialization code from the undo system to write objects out to disk. The TL;DR version is that the undo system is a straight serialization of the in-memory objects, and I didn't want to tie the permanent file format on disk to the in-memory data model.| The Hacks of Life
MHD is a little Python script I wrote to do one-line partial hex dumps of multiple files. I made it public in the middle of last year, but didn’t really announce or introduce it, so I guess t…| Entropymine
One of the most important software titles related to professional audio recording and mixing is Pro Tools. The Digital Audio Workstation by Digidesign, now Avid, has been around since 1991 and was born from the very popular Sound Designer software first released in 1985. When Sound Designer II was released a few years later, the audio format used became the standard file format for audio recordings. Pro Tools progressed from there to become the industry standard for professional audio product...| Obsolete Thor
This is a continuation of Part 1. I’m discussing random trivia about the file command. For a list of other posts about the file command, see this post. Format specifiers Consider the format s…| Entropymine
From JPEGs that show pictures to MP4 videos that make you laugh on viral videos, we'll discover more about the types of file format codes| Logomakerr.AI Blog | Logo, Branding, Business
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 20th annual iPres conference on Digital Preservation in Ghent, Belgium. I enjoyed hearing from many of my respected colleagues on many aspects of preservation including one of my favorite topics, floppy disks. There was tutorials, lightning talks, and even a workshop, presented by Leontien Talboom, Elizabeth Kata, Chris Knowles, and myself. We titled the workshop “A Guide to Imaging Obscure Floppy Disk Formats“. The workshop was conceived by a...| Obsolete Thor
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!
The file command is a classic Unix-centric utility that guesses the format of a file, based only on the file’s contents. It may also print some additional information about the contents of th…| Entropymine
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!
A little diversion while I wait for parts to arrive for my RAID data recovery and rebuild. Fingers crossed we don’t end up in a whole series of reverse engineering the Drobo BeyondRaid Filesy…| Ouch my eye!
After wrapping up with the SSI-IMG format yesterday, I’ve been struggling to come up with what to blog about next. My brain isn’t quite ready to jump back into the PIC format. Then I go…| Ouch my eye!
I couldn’t let it go, or at least my brain couldn’t. After decoding the SSI-IMG file format for the EGA/VGA assets I had planned to leave it at that. The dark corners of my brain, howev…| Ouch my eye!
At the request of one of my readers here, I was asked to look at another graphics asset format. This time it’s the IMG format used by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) with their 1989 release…| 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!
During a recent review of some help files for some older Final Draft software I came across this Q&A. | Obsolete Thor
Cisco 7900 series IP Phone Logo Converter 2020-07-14, 00:00 en Telephone Reverse Engineering File Formats Last week we discovered a box full of old Cisco 7900 series IP phones hidden deep in a pile of boxes in our hackerspace. Of course we tried to get them up and running and figure out how to…| s3lph.me