Dungeon Master Forum

What is the format of graphics.dat (& graphics2).
Are there existing tools that can look and poke around inside them?

The format is a dat file, that is to say, it is the "data file format" that comes with Allegro, the graphics library that I'm using. Whatever tools exist for working on it may also work with DSB's files.

I say may, because, for whatever reason, the Allegro "Grabber" (a rather ugly and hard to use GUI file editor that I do not recommend) refuses to load graphics2.dat.

Sorry if there's no good answer yet.
The only consolation is that better manipulation of the data files is on my (already long ) to-do list.

For the time being, though, if you're trying to use custom graphics, do remember that you can load custom graphics simply by specifying dsb_get_bitmap("FILENAME") which will try to load filename.bmp, before searching the graphics[2].dat files.

If you want to extract them on the other hand, well, I could always send you a zip...

I will have a look with Allegro first, if I don't get far with that maybe you can
send me a zip

I can't get at graphics2.dat with either grabber or dat.exe
Is it encrypted or something?
You are right about grabber being awful!

It's not encrypted... I don't know why it doesn't load, honestly.
I made graphics.dat by hand using Grabber, but I eventually got completely sick of its ugly, clunky interface and wrote a little piece of code to compose the rest of my graphics into a datafile automatically, which is where graphics2.dat came from.
It's of the proper format for the Allegro library to load (as DSB has no trouble with it) but for some reason Grabber dislikes it.... I have no clue why.