Baldies animation

• Company: Creative Edge Software
• Game: Baldies
• Extension: bal

This is an animation format used in DOS version of the game. It consists of one or more segments starting with INAE+RLOC chunks followed by RLE-compressed frames in TCIP chunks. First picture in a segment is coded as intra RLE, the rest are coded as inter RLE.

Chunk formats

INAE chunk - start of sequence, it has 16-bit number of frames in sequence.

RLOC chunk - VGA palette.

TCIP chunk contains compressed frame. It starts with some 32-bit value (which seems to correlate to RLE data size in case of inter frames) and, in case of inter frames, 16-bit number of lines to skip.

Video compression

RLE operation is stored as signed byte, positive value mean copy length, negative values mean run length (followed by run value), zero value signals that the next byte contains skip length.

Intra frames are coded using this method (without skips), inter frames start with the 16-bit number of lines to skip and each line starts with the 16-bit number of pixels to skip and the rest of line data is coded using RLE method explained above. Additionally that RLE data is prefixed by 16-bit size.