When I was trying to fully understand the image files, I had to dive into the binary code for the game. Which meant that I had to reference online documentation a lot, utilize a bunch of different tools and also build my own tool to help with the reverse engineering.
Finally, we have reached the last part of the image files, the animation instructions. This post assumes you have read the earlier ones, and if you haven’t, links to them can be found on this page.
This is part two of my walkthrough of the Dune image files. (Part one can be found here). This part focuses on the color definitions, palettes, that can be found in almost all the images files.
After I figured out the HSQ compression, I started to look into the image files. Something I thought would be relative easy as there was, as with the HSQ compression, code to study.
In my effort to understand the file formats for Dune I have dived into the binary code for it and this has lead to me find that I was not fully correct about the HSQ compression.
The logical start of exploring the Dune resource files is to understand how they are compressed. In the era of floppy disks every byte was important, so it is not surprising that we’ll need to run the files through a decompressing algorithm before we can analyze them further.
I would like to talk a bit about one of my favorite games: Dune.
It is a game that I come back to time and time again and recently I discovered that people on the internet have reverse engineered its data files.
