Dr. Halo PIC

Revision as of 14:27, 30 October 2022

Dr. Halo (including Dr. Halo Plus and Dr. Genius) is a line of raster image editing software for DOS, developed by Media Cybernetics.

Its main native file format is .PIC. Sometimes, a PIC file has a companion .PAL file. This article is about PIC format, and the software in general. There are separate articles for some formats:

• Dr. Halo CUT
• Dr. Halo PAL

PIC format does not seem to be as well known as CUT. A reference to "Dr. Halo format" most likely means CUT, not PIC.

Discussion

PIC is highly "device dependent". A PIC file contains identifiers for the relevant graphics hardware and mode, and a compressed copy of raw video memory.

Some editions of Dr. Halo support several dozen video cards, each with a handful of graphics modes, so supporting the entire format would be quite difficult. But it is realistic to support files that use the standard CGA/EGA/VGA modes.

Identification

PIC files start with ASCII "AH", and the byte at offset 6 is 0x02.

Software

• Dr. Halo
  • Dr Halo II (at WinWorld) - Includes v2.03, and a manual
  • Dr. Halo III (v3.00/1988-02-02)
  • Dr. Halo III (at WinWorld) - Includes Dr. Halo III (v3.00/1989-02-06) & Dr. Genius (v3.00)
  • Dr. Halo Plus (v3.00-German)
  • Dr. Genius (v3.00)
  • Various versions at old-dos.ru - Includes Dr. Halo III (v3.01) and Dr. Halo Plus (v3.00).
  • Possibly relevant: drhalo.unp

Sample files

• 1169.ZIP
• http://cd.textfiles.com/bthevhell/200/150/ → screen*.pic (NSFW)

Links

• Wikipedia: Dr. Halo
• Dr. Halo User's Guide (v1.23)