PCX

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File Format
Name PCX
Ontology
Extension(s) .pcx
MIME Type(s) image/x-pcx
PRONOM fmt/90, others

Contents

Overview

PCX was the native format of a DOS-based program PC Paintbrush, and was for a time (especially the late 1980s) a very popular image format among users of IBM PC compatibles and the PC/MS-DOS operating system. Much clip art was distributed in this format. However, it was tied closely to platform-specific attributes such as the particular graphic modes available in early PCs, and later lost ground to more platform-independent graphic formats like GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

Format

PCX files have a 128-byte fixed header.

Identification

The first byte of a PCX file is 0x0a. The second byte (the version number) is 0, 2, 3, 4, or 5. The third byte (the compression type) should always be 1, though it's possible that 0 is also allowed in some variants of PCX.

Identifiers

See also

Specifications

Software

Sample files

Resources

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
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