Zero72 has played Cave Story, along with a few others. I'm just wondering about the files.

It uses .PBMs which are actually just .BMPs, but when I open 'em up in Paint the # of bottom-left color boxes are almost cut in half, and when I try to copy & paste image data that was made using the full amount of boxes the colors turn funny :-S Is there an editor that can work with the odd .PBMs (which, if I copy & paste into regular .BMPs & rename the filetypes, the game will cause an error)?...

If it does that they aren't just BMP's :)


http://www.irfanview.com/ is able to open it. Haven't tested it though, just read through their supported file types :)

http://filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=pbm&Submit3=Go%21

Perhaps you can edit it with GIMP?

They're low color bitmaps. Save them as 24-bit bitmaps, but in order for the game to use them again you have to save them back in the 256-color bitmap style, which defeats the purpose of any skinning you may want to do.

Wait, save what as 24-bit bitmaps? Would that method be faster than just looking at the regular skin I've already done and constantly going to Edit Colors for both files & manually transferring it pixel by pixel?...

Save the original Cave Story images as 24-bit bitmaps, then edit them to your liking. Save them back as 256-color bitmaps and rename them to .pbm or what have you and you're good to go.

"Save them back as 256-color bitmaps?" They were originally 16-bit...

Oh. Well do that then.

It uses indexed colour, not RGB, and thats why pasting makes the colours funny, it won't use more colours than it originally did.
I tried editing in Photoshop (using the rename technique), and it seems to always cause an error when you play with an edited file.

Editing in 24-bit and changing to 16-bit still screwed up the colors whether I pasted or saved. Lapis'?...

EDIT That's retarded. Saving even a 24-bit into 256-bit still generates loss of color information!!...