Dr. Halo CUT

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File Format
Name Dr. Halo CUT
Ontology
Extension(s) .cut, .pal, .pic
PRONOM x-fmt/316, fmt/1186
Released 1984

Dr. Halo (including Dr. Halo Plus and Dr. Genius) is a line of raster image editing software for DOS, developed by Media Cybernetics. It has several graphics formats associated with it.

Its main native file format is .PIC. However, PIC is not as well known as its .CUT clipping format. CUT is somewhat more portable and device-independent, and more flexible as to the pixel dimensions.

Both PIC and CUT may have a companion .PAL file, containing a color palette. According to the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats: "There are actually two types of .PAL files: generic and video hardware-specific."

Contents

Disambiguation

This CUT format is unrelated to the Amstrad .cut file 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.

CUT uses RLE compression.

We have not located any details about PIC format.

Identification

There's no easy way to identify a CUT file, from its contents. The bytes at offset 4 and 5 should be 0x00, but that's not very helpful.

PIC and PAL files start with ASCII "AH". More research is needed, but the byte at offset 6 should be 0x0a for PAL, and appears to be 0x02 for PIC.

Specifications

Software

Sample files

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