RAW — Raw Screen Capture (.RAW)

.RAW files are proprietary binary screenshots written by the FA engine. They are not compatible with standard image tools and must be converted before viewing or editing. Triggered in-game with Ctrl-Alt-Shift-V; files are written to the FA install directory as screen0.raw, screen1.raw, etc. (incrementing counter) — they never appear inside the .LIB archives.

Tools

fx

fx raw info   <file.RAW>               # header summary
fx raw unpack <file.RAW> [-o out.png]  # convert to PNG
fx raw pack   <file.png> [-o out.RAW]  # PNG -> RAW (max 256 distinct colours)

Other Tools

• GIMP — free, cross-platform
• Paint.NET — free, Windows
• Photoshop $ — industry standard
• Affinity Photo $ — one-time purchase alternative to Photoshop

File Layout

Width and height are stored big-endian — unusual for this little-endian engine, and confirmed against captures at four resolutions (1024×768, 800×600, 640×480, 320×200; see below).

Offset	Size	Type	Description
0x00	6	char[6]	Magic mhwanh
0x06	2	u8[2]	Constant 00 04 (identical at every resolution)
0x08	2	u16 BE	Width in pixels
0x0A	2	u16 BE	Height in pixels
0x0C	2	u8[2]	Constant 01 00
0x0E	18	u8[18]	Null padding
0x20	768	u8[256×3]	Embedded palette: 256 × RGB8 triplets (8-bit 0–255)
0x320	w × h	u8[]	Pixel data: 8-bit palette indices, row-major, top-to-bottom

Total size for a 1024×768 screenshot: 787,232 bytes (32 + 768 + 786,432).

Resolution evidence (confirmed): captures taken at the four supported display modes decode as 04 00/03 00 (1024×768), 03 20/02 58 (800×600), 02 80/01 e0 (640×480), and 01 40/00 c8 (320×200) at offsets 8/10 — big-endian width and height, with the surrounding fields constant. An earlier revision read a little-endian width at 0x06 and guessed w/256, h/256 at 8/10; the multi-resolution corpus falsifies that.

Embedded palette: the .RAW palette is 8-bit RGB (0–255 per channel), not the 6-bit VGA format used by .PAL and .PIC files. No scaling is needed — values are already full 8-bit.

PALETTE.PAL: the PALETTE.PAL extracted from the LIBs is the in-game cockpit/UI palette and does not match the palette embedded in .RAW files. Use the embedded palette when converting screenshots.

Conversion

To convert a .RAW to a standard image: 1. Read the 32-byte header; width = u16 big-endian at offset 8, height = u16 big-endian at offset 10. 2. Read 768 bytes of embedded palette (256 × R, G, B — already 8-bit). 3. Read width × height bytes of pixel indices. 4. Map each index through the palette to produce RGB output.

Round-Trip Notes

• raw_repack re-emits any capture byte-identically from its parsed fields (header re-serialized, palette and pixels copied through; trailing bytes fail rather than being silently carried). All in-install captures verify (tests/test_raw.cpp).
• fx raw pack (PNG import) rebuilds the palette from the image's distinct colours in first-seen order — at most 256; the PNG→RAW→PNG loop is pixel-exact. A repacked file need not be byte-identical to an engine capture of the same scene (palette order is the encoder's choice).

Related

Formats: PAL — contrast: RAW's embedded palette is 8-bit, not VGA 6-bit; PIC — the engine's other paletted-image format.