Collectible Card Game Headquarters

Have you ever wished there was an app for viewing the proprietary .PIC image files found in the original Magic: The Gathering (and other games) from Microprose?
Or perhaps you've wanted to convert them to BitMaps so you could examine and manipulate them further?
...me too!

I've (mostly) succeeded in adding support for Magic: The Gathering to Joel "Quadko" McIntyre's Darklands PicViewer. I say "mostly" because a few of the files will still give it fits (notably Cstline1.pic, Dungeon.pic, and Magic.pic). They either look wonky or cause an out-right crash, so I'm still doing something wrong. Of course, Quadko himself didn't exactly understand the de-compression routine, so I shouldn't feel too bad. (he said that it was "greatly demystified from assembly, and I cannot seem to get the big picture of it." Me neither. ^_^)

I've pre-loaded the proper palette for all non-Shandalar images by default. It will also properly show any Shandalar .PIC files that contain palette information, and you just need to load an image containing the proper palette before viewing any that don't (the file WinBak01.pic contains a mostly-compatible palette for many of the images in the program folder, try loading that one first. The actual palette is contained in the text file TodPal.tr.). I've amended Quadko's PicFileFormat.txt file to reflect new info about the file structure and included the updated sources (they were written using Visual C++ 6.5).

I've also made a tiny app that will copy the palette information from Microprose's .PIC files and create "duel.plogpal" files for use with the Magic: the Gathering image decoding tools from CTPAX-X.
...and to get that proper Shandalar palette, I wrote an even tinier app that converts the text file TodPal.tr to a palette file for use with the same tools.

All of this is included in my updated MtG_PicTools archive below. You can also find converted BitMaps with proper palettes for all .PIC files from MtG in the \Manalink 3.0\Utilities\ folder on MediaFire, if anyone is interested. Please let me know if you have any issues using the tools.

Code: Select all

This is a list of all the Shandalar .PIC
files that contain palette information, so PicViewer 3.1
will display these images properly. Any files not on this
list will need an image with the correct palette to be
loaded before they will display properly.
All non-Shandalar images use PicViewer's default palette,
but none of them contain any palette information.

Art
Art1
Cstline
*Cstline1
Dbox
*Dungeon
*Magic
Ter
Ter1
Ter2
Ter3
Terrain
Terrain1
Tiles
Title1
Win
Win1
Wiz3
Wizdude2
Wizdude
Wizz1

5thwiz
Advfac64
Advinter
Advinter1024
Advinter800
Buycards
Cavebkgd
Celeb
Cityinfo
Clueback
Dung_Bd
Face
Infobar
Lodedul2
Mapbttns
Menopt
Menu2
Menu3
Menu4
Menubak
Namepick
Pedstls
Prdblk
Prdblu
Prdfrma
Prdfrmb
Prdgrn
Prdrd
Prdred
Prdwht
Prdwt
Statbak
Status
Title
Uth-arz
Uthdar
Winbak01
Wingame

*These files either display improperly
 or will cause PicViewer to crash.

Edit:
Updated file to correct the icons on my tiny apps; the transparency was incorrect.

Hi CirothUngol,

I have a question regarding whether it would be possible to replace an image of a specific magic card with a different image entirely (a custom image that I have created, for example), using these tools.

As I have gathered from your description above, these tools can be used to extract .pic images and change them into .bmp format. If I custom-edit the .bmp, then with these tools, will it be possible to convert the edited .bmp back to a .pic format for the game to be able to read it?

I'm also a little confused about what is going on with palettes. I have inferred from the above statements that before you can load an image, you must first load the proper palette. The proper palette is already preloaded for all non-Shandalar images. For Shandalar images, certain images already contain the palette information inside them, while others you have to locate and load the palette first-- and that the tiny app or the tinier app (not sure which) is used for this purpose.

Is that correct?

Thanks

EDIT 7/31 -- Nevermind the above question. The card images are .jpgs -- very easy to replace.

Hi guys!!!
Im edititing the original manalink2.0 image files (change colors/filtering/etc)
Im using the tools posted to convert pic->bmp

Now I need a way to convert bmp->pic again.
Any solution?


(I know that .pic from mamanlink3.0 are .png files, so it would be easier to edit ML3 instead ML2... but Im modding ML2 because is the one that I use to play against internet opponents)

Travolter,

I put together some tools to help convert .pic files to .png files and vice versa. I can't give you the URL because I'm a new user, but you can go to github /benprew/mp_pictools

I was able to successfully extract all the images from the original game and confirmed that I could convert a .png back to a pic.

Give it a try and let me know if you have any issues. Thanks!

Thanks Ben!
https://github.com/benprew/mp_pic_tools

@ ilikethemeta thanks so much for your work!!!! Ill continue with my project of changing pics with your tools

Of course, glad I could help! I also added some instructions for converting from .png back to .pic. I added them to the repo README: github benprew/mp_pic_tools?tab=readme-ov-file#replacing-a-pic-image-in-shandalar
Also, we have a discord if you want to chat with other people doing modding: discord.gg/kCE9keMH