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 MicroProse. PAN files are animations, so I’m going to assume PAN stands for PIC Animation. Lets see if we can help Mike out and help to figure this one out.
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Posts related to various MicroProse games and assets
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PIC: The lost version
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 for 256 colour VGA. The title in question? “Gunship 2000” (GS2K) from 1991. The title is interesting in the fact that, like “F117A”, it relies on the original PIC format and not the later ones MicroProse was already using with other titles at the time. Likely due to being based on older game engine code. As such, I didn’t expect much, why would it be any different than the version we already looked at? Guess someone at MicroProse didn’t get the memo. 🤣
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PIC as we know it
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.
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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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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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Loose ends
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 a number of different formats, though mostly all from MicroProse, I’ve left some loose ends of unfinished work. I think it’s time we start wrapping up those loose ends, especially with regards to the MicroProse PIC file format. This post is mostly intended as a recap of what we’ve covered so far, to see what is still outstanding.
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Running on empty
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 input image into the format. This post will mostly concentrate on the EGA image format, as there really isn’t anything to do with the PAK image format as it was just raw image data. The EGA format is more interesting in that it uses a form of RLE compression we had not seen until this point with the formats we’ve looked at so far.
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A new sub in the barn
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 be a previously unseen sub-type of the PIC89 variant of the PIC file format. I had actually suspected that this sub-type might exist, back when we were exploring the PIC89 variant (then referred to as PIC90 for reasons covered here), but had no assets to support that theory until now. Lets dig in and see what this mystery sub-type holds for us.
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Ouch my eye! 