TGA

Revision as of 00:26, 21 November 2014

TGA (Targa) is a simple raster image file format developed by Truevision, Inc. (then named EPICenter) in 1984. Designed for use with MS-DOS color applications, TGA is the native format of Truevision's TARGA (Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter) boards, which were some of the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible PCs to support 24-bit RGB color encoding (sometimes termed truecolor).

Format

Files have an 18-byte fixed header, followed by various other segments.

Identifiers

Filename extensions other than .tga are obsolete. Originally, some Truevision products used other extensions: .icb (Image Capture Board), .vda (Video Display Adapter), .vst (Vista).

Identification

TGA files have no signature at the beginning of the file. They can be identified fairly reliably by testing whether the first 18 bytes have valid values for TGA format, but that is nontrivial.

Some, but not all, TGA files have a signature at the end of the file. In that case, the last 18 bytes of the file are the ASCII characters "TRUEVISION-XFILE.", followed by a NUL byte (0x00).

Specifications

• Truevision TGA File Format Specification, Version 2.0: PostScript · PDF · HTML
• Information extracted by Martin Reddy from Appendix C of the Truevision Technical Guide
• Another copy of the file
• Picture format docs (of a number of formats including this one)

Software

TGA is widely supported. Software listed here has been arbitrarily selected.

• Netpbm: pamtotga, tgatoppm
• ImageMagick
• Libtga

Sample files

• http://www.fileformat.info/format/tga/sample/index.htm
• http://samples.libav.org/image-samples/TGA/
• http://links.uwaterloo.ca/Repository/TGA/
• http://www.virtualservidores.com/cstrike/gfx/env/
• tombexcavator samples

Links

• Truevision TGA: Wikipedia
• TGA File Format Summary, from the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats
• Creating TGA Image files By Paul Bourke, 1996.
• TGA format chart