Dr. Halo CUT

Revision as of 21:19, 5 August 2020

Dr. Halo was a line of raster image editing software for MS-DOS. It has a well-known device-independent .CUT image format, which uses RLE compression (in a way which is similar to, but not the same as, PackBits). CUT files are sometimes accompanied by .PAL palette files.

There is also a device-dependent .PIC image format. We have not located any details about PIC format.

Format details

All CUT images have exactly 8 bits per pixel, but all 8 bits might not be used. It is common for the only color codes used by an image to be 0 and 1.

It is not clear what to do if no palette file is present. Interpreting the image as grayscale, with black=0, seems to be standard practice. But different viewers use different logic for guessing the code that should be interpreted as white.

Software

• ImageMagick (format named "CUT"; read only)
• Konvertor (read only)
• XnView (read only)
• Farbfeld Utilities (read/write)
• Tom's Editor
• Tom's Viewer
• Dr. Halo (read/write)
  • Dr. Halo III - Floppy disk images from archive.org
  • Dr. Halo Plus 3.00 (German) - Floppy disk images from archive.org
  • Possibly relevant: drhalo.unp

Sample files

• http://cd.textfiles.com/fantaziasampler/CLIPART/CUT/
• http://cd.textfiles.com/gameempire/SOFT/NEW/PRO7/
• http://cd.textfiles.com/librisbritannia/GRAPHICS/CLIPDRHA/ ...
  • 1169.ZIP - PIC format
• https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/image/drHalo/

Links

• Dr. Halo File Format Summary, from the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats
• Picture format docs (of a number of formats including this one)