Trying to rip the funny meme tennis ball avatar pictures from The Palace

[K4sum1]

You might have seen this meme before



I wanted to find this program and extract the avatars from it. With some searching I found that this program is called The Palace. It's a virtual world community chat room sort of thing from 1995. So I went to try to get an old version from archive.org and found one.

http://web.archive.org/web/200112121508 ... serWin.exe

I was able to extract the installer, resource hack the program, and get the image, however this is what it looks like.

Does anyone know how I'd make the image color? I'd like to have original quality versions of these avatars.

Looking at the data more specifically, the avatar image is stored as RCDATA in PALACE32.exe. I can also find a "COLORTABLE" in the executable too, which might be what applies the color to the image. However other than that I'm not really sure what to do. Does anyone know how it may be applying color to the image for the dialog?

I would upload COLORTABLE, but the forum doesn't want me to.

[banyaszvonat]

Is the resource stored as a .gif, or is that a byproduct of the extraction? Either way, I'm going out on a limb: based on the filename "FACEDIB", it could be a format I haven't seen since the 2000s: https://docs.fileformat.com/image/dib/

The 256 color mode is indexed color. After seraching around a bit, I found this post that seems to have plenty of details about working with this format using the Windows GDI API:
https://mvps.org/user32/gditutorial.html

Section "DIBs and palettes and converting" details how the Windows GDI handles indexed palettes. I'm not sure it would work with the exported .gif, but if you have a byte-for-byte identical copy of the original resource, you could just try to treat each byte in the actual image data (sans BITMAPINFO header) as an index into the COLORTABLE.

I could be wildly off here, because I don't think an indexed bitmap looks like grayscale when opened as RGB.

(Also, hi! First post here.)

[K4sum1]

Is the resource stored as a .gif, or is that a byproduct of the extraction? Either way, I'm going out on a limb: based on the filename "FACEDIB", it could be a format I haven't seen since the 2000s: https://docs.fileformat.com/image/dib/

The 256 color mode is indexed color. After seraching around a bit, I found this post that seems to have plenty of details about working with this format using the Windows GDI API:
https://mvps.org/user32/gditutorial.html

Section "DIBs and palettes and converting" details how the Windows GDI handles indexed palettes. I'm not sure it would work with the exported .gif, but if you have a byte-for-byte identical copy of the original resource, you could just try to treat each byte in the actual image data (sans BITMAPINFO header) as an index into the COLORTABLE.

I could be wildly off here, because I don't think an indexed bitmap looks like grayscale when opened as RGB.

(Also, hi! First post here.)

I don't know how to extract the file byte for byte. Resource hacker appears to just make it into a .gif, and I'm assuming the DIB wouldn't have GIF87 at the beginning in a hex editor. I would like to see if you could do it though. I sent the link to the installer in the post, and you can just extract it with 7-zip. It's in PALACE32.exe.

[banyaszvonat]

Turns out I was wrong. I extracted it myself with Resource Hacker, and another extractor. Both resulted in the same GIF, so it looks like it's just stored like that. I'm still fairly sure that it's doing some sort of palette manipulation at runtime, but now I'm less certain about the specifics.