[Pir] Pirates! Gold for Windows

[Lord_Hill]

I was able to pick up 'Sid Meier's Pirates! Limited Edition' (minus the giant boardgame box and t-shirt) for a sane price off of ebay, which also scored me a copy of the original Pirates! Gold for Windows on the bonus DVD. You can definitely tell it's an older game than CivWin and ColWin, it forces 256 colour mode which sadly means WineVDM cannot run it properly, and also forces a 640x480 window which cannot be resized. If your desktop resolution is 640x480 it will fullscreen, and if it's bigger you get a window. You cannot toggle this at all, it's all hardcoded.

Also, none of the assets are compressed or in a container file, most of the graphics are literally loose PCX files that you can open up and edit at will. The music is made up of MID files which play back the same MIDI tunes from the DOS version. The maps themselves are also PCX files that use coloured pixels to denote the different terrain types (just like Civ) so map editing is trivial. Here is a screenshot of my incredible custom map.

 

[Civinator]

What format have the pcx files of the ships (Civ 3 has pcx graphics, too) ?

 

[Lord_Hill]

They are 8 bit PCX files with indexed palette of 256 colours. It seems I spoke too soon though, the PCX files are all background screens (and the in game maps themselves). The ships are stored as files with an SPR format which is presumably a collection of sprites for animation. I know Colonization does a similar sort of thing, I wonder if it's the same format.

 

[Civinator]

Thank you very much for the answer. Unfortunately these graphics seem to have not much use for Civ 3.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Indeed, even if the ship graphics could be extracted, I don't think they'd make great Civ III icons on their own. It'd be better to have an artist redo them in the Civ III style from scratch in my opinion.