.PIC files and how the defeated me.

Porphyria Plan

I have more than a few .PIC files that I seem to not be able to view no matter what I do. I have tried every free windows program on this site plus photoshop to no avail. I also used a program called FileAlyzer to try and figure out if maybe I could get more info but I've hit dead ends that route too. I should also include that the picture is from game released in 1997. So unless they had a time machine the program that works will have been released earlier than that.

My question is how do I find out how to open it? Is there a program that can analyze it or a trick to indentify the problem, that works?

brandotheninjamaster

Have you tried The Gimp? Its a longshot but at least its free...

Porphyria Plan

I did.

Should have mentioned it also.

Speakeasy

http://filext.com/file-extension/PIC

http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/pic

Hope that helps.

Porphyria Plan

Looks like the second link has a lot more apps that I haven't tried. Going to plug away looking at them all, just hope that all of those I haven't tried have demos.

Thank you both for helping.

Janin

If you can't figure it out on your own, post one of the images and let us try to open it.

MichaelLC

Janin wrote: »

If you can't figure it out on your own, post one of the images and let us try to open it.

I'd be glad to take a crack at it. I love a good file challenge.

PirateJon

are you sure the files aren't in some propritary format? have you looked at the file headers?

flatlinegraphics

.pic is a legacy mac format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_graphics_file_formats
PICT PICT Apple Computer .pict, .pic, .pct image/pict Metafile for Mac OS, not meant for print publishing. patented: yes

the fact that the format is patented means you may have trouble finding free/open source programs that will open it. irfanview will open them, with a quicktime filter, but not save.

quicktime itself may open the file, but unless you have quicktime pro ($30), you will probably have trouble saving (barring just screen shotting it)

corcorigan

Get someone with a Mac to open them? I used to play around with pict files over a decade ago fiddling about with some Mac games...

blincoln

There's no guarantee that just because the file extension is .pic, that they are of the same type as the Mac PICT format. Like PirateJon said, it could be proprietary - many games use proprietary file formats, often with generic extensions like ".pic" because it's short for "picture".

flatlinegraphics

hm.. if its really a proprietary file that just has a .pic extension, good luck. if its from a game, they may be using raw data files that the game engine interprets or something weird. if you can post one up somewhere, maybe we can take some cracks at it.

Porphyria Plan

Ok after spending some time trying to figure out how to view the file header I uploaded the file to a free host (mediafire seems the least bloated).

Here is the link

I had partially considered a few things why I could not open it but not it being proprietary. I wondered if it was given a fake or dummy extension and maybe even protected in some way (I doubt it though).

I have also tried Quicktime. Comes up with "Couldn't display "Poison.pic" because a suitable graphics importer couldn't not be found." Interestingly enough the file was associated with Quicktime by default.

I'll get back to trying more demos programs.

So far I've tried
ACDSee
Brava! Reader
CorelDRAW
FastStone Image Viewer
FotoCanvas PIC Image
Gimp
IrfanView
Konvertor
Paint
Paint Shop
Quicktime
Windows Picture and Fax Viewer
XnView

Maybe one or two others I forget.

FF

Ok, this is very interesting. I downloaded it, and Mac OS X (10.5) is IDing the file as a "Radiance" file. By default I can't get it to open, but I've only tried with Preview so far.

I'll post if I can get it to do anything.

Porphyria Plan

Alright, that gives me something to work with. I found a free beta program the looks like it deals with images. It's late so I'll get cracking at it tommorrow.

Hope you find something and if you don't, that I do.

Thanks for the help

embrik

Well, Photoshop CS2 & Imageready won't open it either, but judging by the fact that the file size is only 299 bytes (0.2 KB), it's not really large enough to be anything more than a pixel or two. Opening it in a text editor doesn't yield much either - no telltale starting characters or anything.

flatlinegraphics

that beta makes me think that this is not a graphic file at all. a baked texture, normal map, lighting map, or some other 3d game engine gubbin. esp this:
"If you're ready to start using Radiance with Ecotect to do a lighting simulation,.."

this also goes with embrik's post. a file that small is most likely a data file, and with the above info, its probably just a configuration file for the game engine.

blincoln

I am looking at it in a hex editor right now. I don't have time to analyze it in depth but it looks like the first 30 or so bytes are different from the rest. A wild stab in the dark would be that the first 32 bytes are 16 colours in 16-bit format, and the rest of the file is 4-bit references to those colours. With a 4-bit indexed format like that, this could be an e.g. 32x16 bitmap with some space left over.
Unless you write your own viewer/converter, I doubt you are going to be able to do anything with these files outside of the game.
Edit: also, as far as I can tell, there is no header, so the results that any application gives as to its file type are going to be pretty meaningless IMO.
Edit 2: I just remembered that I have some half-finished software at home that would let me test my theory. I'll try and give it a shot later tonight.

blincoln

I am having trouble finding anything conclusive in such a small file without anything else to go on. Can you do any or all of the following?
- Tell me what game it's from.
- Provide a screenshot of what this picture looks like in the game.
- Provide another one of these files that is larger.
?

Porphyria Plan

Of course blincoln.

The game is Magic the Gathering: Shandalar from Microprose. I contacted another person who I found online that was trying to reverse engineer the game like I was. What he was able to tell me is that the same .pic files are also present in Civilization and Darklands, two other microprose games. I suspect they may also be preset in the Xcom games which came out around the same time. I'd have to reinstall Xcom, which is a bitch to get running, to test that theory though. I know there were a couple of projects that added ships to Xcom and I hope I could find someone with the knowlege on how to edit the files. Barring that I'm going to check the Civilization and Darklands communities to see what they have.

Checking on the screen shot. Cardbk_Blackland.pic, This screenshot is the most likely canidate. Keep in mind all text on the card is handled by a different file that I can edit. So it is my guess that the .pic will be the same just with no text. It will also satisfy your higher filesize. *edit* I just tested it by removing the file from the game. Sure enough everything was white except for the text and oddly enough the picture of the swamp.

flatlinegraphics

if they handle that game the way they handle the MTGO client now, the card frames are separate from the card art. they do that in gatherer too. that way they can recycle the frame for each card and just swap the art. the file you removed is the frame. the text is overlayed by the game engine, and the card art is a separate file.

guessing at the file name, Cardbk_Whitecreature.pic would be the card frame for a white creature card. Cardfrnt_swamp1.pic might be the graphic for a swamp card art.

japan

For what it's worth, Cinepaint doesn't recognise it either.

blincoln

Okay, I compared the files and learned two things on my own:

- The first two bytes are 0x5830, which is the "magic number" for this filetype.
- The next two bytes after that are an unsigned integer which represents the number of data bytes in the file, starting from offset 4.

I tried reading the data as a couple different kinds of bitmap and didn't get anything useful, so I googled the magic number and came up with this document on the file format:

http://www.darklands.net/files/PicFileFormat.txt

That site has a download section where you can get a viewer:

http://www.darklands.net/files/files.shtml

It doesn't work perfectly (the palette it uses for the larger file is wrong, but it does open the Poison picture correctly), but give it a try on the other images you have. The file format is complicated enough (and proprietary enough) that you probably will not find another viewer unless you write it yourself or convince someone else to.

Edit: The viewer is "PicViewer3". It includes a bunch of source code. Just unzip the whole package and run PicViewer.exe.

Porphyria Plan

Progress!

I was coming here to say I found a program to view pic files for civilization. The file can be found here. Must be run in dos and it suffers from getting the color incorrect also. The worst is that it shows up for around a second before dumping you back to the command prompt. So blincoln, your prog is much more superior in that I can make sense of it.

At least now I can look at and identify the images. Thank you very much.

blincoln

You're welcome. I wish there were an app that fully supported the files you have. Like I said, the format is fairly complicated for something that old.
Were there any other files included with the game that were named Cardbk_Blackland but with an extension other than .pic? I'm wondering if there was a separate palette file or something, maybe a shared palette file that all of the card images used.

Porphyria Plan

I can supply a file that is in .pic and .bmp format that are the same image. I confirmed it in the Darklands viewer and paint respectively. I had found these trying to compair and find something in a hex editor last night. Now there are around 10 files that have 2 image files for them. I picked these two since they display a lot of different colors but there are a few that are very simple if those would be better.

Winbk_Shellscreen.pic
Winbk_Shellscreen16.bmp

This is the title screen. Some of the files that are duplicated are weird in the context of the game and I have no idea yet why there are two for only a handful.

As for a color pallette file. I'm not sure. There is a .cat file in one of the directories but I don't think it has anything to do with the color pallette. I could be wrong. I've been able to examine it with a fan made cat viewer and all that is in there that I've found are a bunch of small files titled noname1, 2, 3, etc. that I've yet to find out how to open. THey have no file extension.

blincoln

That one to me looks like the palette is at the end of the file. What I'm guessing is that because the game is from 1997, the various cards shared one palette to save memory. Either that or the file format is a little different than the viewer was made to support. You could try emailing the people who run the Darklands site and see if they'd be willing to look at the files and see about adding full support for them to the viewer. That's the only thing I can think of that isn't a complete hassle, because the file format is complicated enough that it's not just a "throw a few extra lines of code into another viewer's code to add support for it" situation.
In terms of things that *are* a complete hassle, you could open the images that don't show the correct palette in Photoshop and do a select->colour range and then manually change that one colour to what you think is the correct one. Repeat for each colour in the image.