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.

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.