Starflight Hacking

In the course of my research into Starflight I have discovered many things. Some are available elsewhere on the interweb, some are not.

I will include a few choice items here.

Amiga version :- Graphic Archives

The graphics are stored in a bespoke format TLB.
Be aware that the byte ordering is motorola format.


Each archive starts with a header.

typedef struct TLBHEADER
{
	char	 Type[4];		 	//TLBR
	int	Filelength;
	short	 NRecords;
	char	 Padding[2];
}t_tlb_hdr;

There then follows NRecords +1 int's which are the offset of each graphic within the file.
The extra int exists so you can get the length of the last graphic.

Each graphic starts with a six byte header, byte 5 of this is a type byte which specifies the storage used for this graphic.

Byte 4 is a scalar, usually the width in bytes of the graphic.

The identified types are...

Type 0

16 colour sprite stored in 4 bit planes.
Byte 4 is the width in bytes so the height is (size-6)/(Byte4*4)

Example

Type 1

Seems to be functionally identical to type 0

Example

Type 2

16 colour sprite with mask.
The mask is stored as the first bit plane, so the height becomes (size-6)/(Byte4*5)

Example

Type 3

Seems to functionally identical to type 2

Example

Type 5

Run length encoded graphic.
Each byte is a flag which has the following meaning.

• -1 to -127 (repeat the next byte 1+(0-a) times
• 1 to 127 (copy the next 1+a bytes
• -128 NOP

This produces a 16 bit nibble per pixel bit stream.

Example

Type 7

This is an animated sprite, I haven't decoded this yet.

Type 10

This s a pallete.


Each four bytes maps to a pallete record with byte 0 being the index within the pallete and the next 3 the RGB values.