It’s been a while, too long, since I last posted here. Life has kept me busy. I’ve renovated and sold my house and moved to a new city, and have been settling in ever since. As a result writing about formats that I’ve already done, and exploring new ones, has been neglected. Frankly I’ve been overwhelmed every time I’ve sat down to try and write. But, I’m still here, alive and kicking, and trying to find the inspiration to get back into the thick of it. Recent conversations with a few different friends from the modding community have started to get my inspiration flowing again. I won’t promise anything will come quickly, but there is a lot to write about and release.
While I have a couple of new (old) formats I’m currently looking at. Here is a brief list of formats I’ve done (nearly 2 years ago now… yikes!) that I’m hoping to get posted about and code released for.
- MicroProse PAN completion
- MicroProse PIC code release
- NovaLogic KLC file format
- NovaLogic MRL file format
- NovaLogic PCX/LZP1 Compression (non-standard)
- NovaLogic PCX (standard) + “Shadow Tools”/”CerB” data
- Vektor Graphics file formats from various titles (Later MicroProse after acquisition)
- B17
- Strike Aces / Fighter Bomber
- Dogfight
- Killing Cloud
- Shuttle
- MicroProse CAT encoding
- MicroProse CDF encoding
- MicroProse SPC encoding
- MicroProse MADSPack and MADSCONCAT (.hag, .ss, .pik …)
- MicroProse Civilization/Colonization asset formats (MADSPack container, and NE EXE extractions)
- RedStorm Entertainment RSB
- Maxis TILE format
- Code Releases for the myriad of formats I’ve already talked about
I’ve no doubt missed a bunch, and sadly many of these will really just be data-dumps of what they are, and not the process that was involved in figuring them out. As unfortunately a lot of that detail was lost in the past few years for various reasons. I will make an effort to try and illustrate and explain certain concepts. Some of the formats have been “soft released” through other means. Mainly via the people that requested help in decoding those formats, but I will officially release my code here once I get to writing about it. Needless to say it’s a lot, and the posts take a lot of work, so it won’t be the fastest release schedule.
While I was away
Things have come full circle in some respects. For those that have been following since the beginning of this file format reverse-engineering journey, will remember that this all started off with this post about another blog regarding the reverse engineering of F15 Strike Eagle II and the MicroProse PIC format it uses. Well since then I’ve occasionally kept in contact with neuviemeporte as well as followed along with his blog. As it turns out that through some community help, and some assistance from LLM’s, his efforts to reverse-engineer the game has made progress in leaps and bounds. What he initially expected to take years, was solved in just a fraction of the time. He now has a working playable port of the original game! If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend checking out his blog on his efforts. Unfortunately my PIC code hasn’t been released in time for him to make use of it, but I have been able to provide a few pointers to hopefully help solve some issues they were having.
Thanks so much to those of you that keep checking in here, sorry it’s been so long since I last posted anything. I’m doing my best not to make it another nearly 2 years before my next one. In the meantime, if there are any preferences as to which formats people want to see first, please comment below. It will help me prioritize which ones to sweep off my desk first. Thanks again for tuning in, and sticking with me over the years, there’s more to come. I’m far from done.
Ouch my eye! 
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