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!
It’s been a while since I last posted, so I thought I’d give a quick update of where things stand. (TLDR: I’m still here, progress is slow, but it is happening.) My main focus the past few months has been preparing my house to put on the market, which has occupied a lot of my […]| 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!
It’s been a while since my last post, and will probably be a little longer before I get back into any regular schedule, but I’m still here. My last general post I mentioned that I had been dealing with a serious illness in my family. Sadly that culminated in spending pretty much the entirety of […]| 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!
Sorry for the silence everyone. It’s been a tough ride the past while. I have been dealing with a serious illness with a member of my family, and have spent most of my time and energy helping…| Ouch my eye!
Do not look at LASER with remaining eye!| Ouch my eye!
Or so they say. Well in this case, it may be that a picture is worth a thousand hours of looking at raw data. In my last post we decoded the RLE data stream that was output from the LZW compressed …| Ouch my eye!
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!
I decided to take a brief interlude from the MicroProse PIC file format we have been reverse engineering over the last while. In this post we will look at another MicroProse file format, the SPC fi…| Ouch my eye!
We have some unfinished business to do in light of the discoveries we made last time. I now no longer trust my prior results with the RLE encoder, so we need to go back and revisit that result. Las…| Ouch my eye!
Posts related to my efforts in reverse engineering the MicroProse .PIC file format used to store the visual assets for many of their PC/DOS based games in the late 1980's and early 1990's| Ouch my eye!
I’ve interrupting my planned post to make this one, as this potentially has an effect on that post. Yesterday after my post about additional titles went live, one of my readers, who wishes to…| Ouch my eye!
We last left off having uncovered a dew more mysteries of the MicroProse PIC file format. We wrote a tool to examine PIC files to try and determine which version of the file they were, after some r…| 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!
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!
Okay maybe the end of my last post was a little evil. But I swear it wasn’t just a gimmick to get you to come back and read more. I knew things weren’t perfect, and I wanted to separate…| Ouch my eye!