[sedatk]

That’s what I was gonna say. Reverse engineering was the only way in the 90’s as documentation was scarce. I had to reverse anything if I wanted to understand how it worked.

Here is an extractor I wrote for Westwood PAK and Lucasarts LFD files when I was 16: https://gist.github.com/ssg/e3e9654612be916336c01e104b10ddc7

[andrewf]

I picked apart some of the Dark Forces files myself as a kid. The GOB file was pretty obvious - I was familiar with Doom WADs, it's basically the same. I figured out the graphics formats by setting up VGA 320x200 mode with the contents of a .PAL file, and dumping the graphics file into screen memory. Then looking at the noise around the familiar patterns to figure out all the run/skip length stuff that wasn't just a pixel value.

[sedatk]

Fantastic! I love how we’ve been through the same stuff despite being perhaps continents apart.