Working artwork

An F-16 in Apache's palette

Some of the images on the disc were working files used to prepare colours and artwork. This one contains a cockpit from another Digital Integration game, iF-16, and a small addition by somebody with a paint program.

An F-16 cockpit screenshot with a stick figure holding an Abu Dabi sign — The replacement image is dated 22 May 1997 and appears on the later discs.

What was it doing here?

3DPAL.LBM is a palette source. Its first 224 colours become the 672 bytes in 3DPAL.RGB, which the game reads. The screenshot and the “Abu Dabi” sign survive in the working image.

The earlier version, found on the 1996 discs, shows a small map on a magenta background. Its file date is 2 March 1995. Comparing releases let us follow the change from one image to the other.

A surviving tool command

rgb 3dpal /f0 /l223

The batch file exports palette entries 0 through 223. A few bytes of colour data were the useful output from this whole picture.

The original FOG palette source image — `FOG.LBM`, another screenshot used as a palette source.

Twenty colours for fog

At first these files look like a collection of screenshots mixed in with the actual game artwork. The fog image has a practical role too: palette entries 135 through 154 match the twenty colours in the game's fog RGB file.

Other sheets supply explosion frames and font glyphs. The filenames, palette ranges and export commands give us a useful view of how the art was prepared.

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