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TIC-80

Fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games. · By Nesbox

.tic file format explain?

A topic by Bitca created May 28, 2017 Views: 1,931 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 5

@nesbox, can you explain .tic file format? I just want to change the map from outside.

Developer

for sure, the cartridge consists of chunks, every has 4-byte header (1 byte - type, 3 bytes - size) and data

chunk types:
1 - tiles
2 - sprites
3- cover
4 - map
5 - code
9 - sfx
10 - waveforms
11 - music
(1 edit)

which kind of information (specification) is stored in the chunk 14? (0x0E) - and how the information on the chunk 3 (cover) is stored? (btw, sfx and waveforms might need to be documented as well) - would be really great having the whole .tic format specification documented! :)  (i'm aware how toilsome is to document anything, perhaps we should start a wiki page somewhere and keep improving it voluntarily and progressively? )

Awesome! thank you.

and i want to change the music data from outside - how is that information organized?

Type 3 (cover) is essentially a GIF image file. You can just copy any GIF image's binary data you want, as long as it's less than 65536 bytes. (Nesbox was wrong, only 2 bytes for size are actually being read, the 3rd byte is unused.)

Type 5 (code) is plain text. All other valid types are based on the TIC-80 RAM layouts for each of those assets.

Useful wiki pages:

https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/wiki/tic-File-Format
https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/wiki/RAM