PCX

PiCture eXchange, abbreviated to PCX, is a, now mostly defunct, raster graphic format created by ZSoft Corporation in 1985. It is the native format for ZSoft's raster graphics editor, PC Paintbrush. The format supports color bit depths of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 24, as well as transparency in most. The format uses run-length encoding compression. There is also a multi-paged PCX format called DCX which was used by older fax and document management software.

Personal

Not having access to PC Paintbrush, the PCX format was largely unknown to me. I remember stumbling upon it by accident when I edited the graphics in Hugo's House of Horrors, but it wasn't until I was around 18-years-old that I recognized them as a unique graphic format. I found a QuickBASIC program which decode and display PCX images on screen. This wasn't much help to me, as I didn't have any software that could make PCXs, but, not long after that I discovered DirectQB, which used PCX as its default image format, and I got a copy of Corel Draw 7 through my school which could save the format. For the next couple years, I used PCX heavily as I started writing various games. However, as I slowly realized that QuickBASIC and PCX were both dying tech, I slowly made less use of them.

Software

Program	Functions	Notes
Corel Photo-Paint	Open, Edit, Save	Doesn't support transparency or 16-bit color.
ImageMagick	Open, Edit, Save	Supports all features.
IrfanView	Open	Can view PCXs using pretty much all features.
Paintbrush (Microsoft)	Open, Edit, Save	1-8-bit color only. Doesn't support transparency.
PC Paintbrush	Open, Edit, Save	Supports all features in the final version.

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