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 as a formal document for the PIC format, with everything we know so far, and possibly make a few changes too. If you haven’t followed along the whole adventure over the past four months, you may want to read that first, you can find all the PIC related posts here, though I will try to link to relevant posts here as I go. With that said, let’s get down to business.
(more…)September 2024
Post Index
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MAXed out
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 last post, I took a quick poke around the other files included with the game. A number of files with “MAX” in the name along with “EGA”, “VGA”, and “MCGA” caught my eye. These are obviously related to the various graphics modes the game supports, and likely contain more graphic assets, just like we found with the 3 CAT files in my last post. I’ll try to keep this adventure a quick one, so with that let’s dig into it.
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Cat Pics were always a thing
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 files structure, and wrote some code to extract the contents. We also mentioned the existence of a slightly different variant found with MicroProse’s M1 Tank Platoon. So let’s take a look at this other variant to see how it differs from the version we’ve already looked at.
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Just toss it in the BIN
This is actually a format variant I did a while back, but never got around to writing about it. In this case it’s a .BIN image file from SSI’s Western Front. I’ve decided to include it with their .IMG format as it is raw image data just like the IMG format is, with only a slight difference in how the data is encoded. Also I felt .BIN was a bit too generic to be considered it’s own unique type, this is more of an alias extension. So let’s dig into it and see what the differences are.
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A glitch in the timeline
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 to our list. This is the first time we’ve added a non PC title that supports the PIC format, though I do believe it has been used on other platforms as well. This all happened a couple of days ago so here’s how it went down.
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2-for-1 special, with a spicy side
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 things off with a new one to get back in the groove of things. This one being the CDF file format used by MicroProse with a few of their games. Now unlike many of the other formats we have looked at so far, there are tools already out in the wild for manipulating these files. Most notably those made by Paulo Morais which I’ve seen mentioned and linked to on several EAW (European Air War) themed forums. Unfortunately only the binaries seem to exist, and there is no documentation I’ve been able to find that details the format, this post will hopefully change that.
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Ouch my eye! 