PCX

PCX was the native image format of a DOS-based program PC Paintbrush from ZSoft Corporation, 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.

PC Paintbrush was licensed to Microsoft, and it evolved into the Paint/Paintbrush application included with Windows. The versions for Windows 3.0 through Windows 95 support PCX format.

Format

PCX files have a 128-byte fixed header.

Identifiers

• PCX v0: fmt/86
• PCX v2: fmt/87
• PCX v3: fmt/88
• PCX v4: fmt/89
• PCX v5: fmt/90

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.

See also

• DCX

Specifications

• http://www.fileformat.info/format/pcx/spec/index.htm

Software

• ImageMagick
• Netpbm: ppmtopcx, pcxtoppm
• IrfanView
• XnView

Sample files

• http://samples.libav.org/image-samples/pcx/
• http://cd.textfiles.com/clipart1996/ ...

Resources

• Wikipedia: PCX
• Wikipedia: PC Paintbrush
• Wikipedia: Microsoft Paint
• PCX Format, from the DOS Game Modding Wiki
• PCX File Format Summary, from the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats
• PCX technical reference
• Picture format docs (of a number of formats including PCX)