VGAPaint 386 PCX Self-Extracting Picture

Latest revision as of 15:47, 17 December 2021

VGAPaint 386 PCX Self-Extracting Picture (referred to here as PCX-SFX) is an unusual raster graphics file created by VGAPaint 386, an image and animation editor for DOS. For more information about VGAPaint 386, refer to VGAPaint 386 Animation.

[edit] Discussion

A PCX-SFX file is almost a PCX file, but the first two bytes are different, and it contains executable code in some otherwise-unused bytes.

The format seems to have a very narrow use case. A PCX-SFX file is not an executable file; it is essentially a fragment of machine code that could be incorporated into a computer program.

The documentation says that this feature "Saves the current picture in a special self-extracting format. To uncompress, load the file into a memory buffer the necessary size +1024, then call it in 32-bit protected mode."

[edit] Identification

PCX-SFX files start with bytes eb 0e 01 08, and (at least for v1.4) have e8 00 00 00 00 58 83 e8 15 60 8d b0 at offset 16.

[edit] Software

• VGAPaint 386 - Refer to VGAPaint 386 Animation#Software

Note: Using a hex editor to change the first two bytes from eb 0e to 0a 05 should be sufficient to convert the file to a valid PCX file.