Anyone know how to make custom data types so that instead of .bmp / mp3 files that you can open and have access to all the internal game data, hav one big file that contains "Music," one for "Graphics," etc? For eg: Diablo II, uses "Diablo II Data Archive" as the data type of its data, and has "Diablo II Game Data," "Diablo II Speech," "Diablo II Sounds," "Diablo II Graphics," "Diablo II Movies," etc, as separate files that people can''t open using any app. I appreciate your help!

you can''t program games unless you know how to program normally.
buy a good book.

I don''t suppose that post helped you much. It is a good point, though. I believe what you are talking about is commonly called a resource file (not the kind that MSVC makes for dialogs ). It is just a whole bunch of graphics files merged together by some clever method. You can make your own by writing a program to add your graphics (I think it will work for just about any kind of file, not just graphics) to the resource, and have a table of contents or some other easy (and fast) way of finding stuff. Then you just need to modify your graphics loading routine to look for the specified file in the table of contents of your resource file instead of on your hard drive.

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What commonly happens is that someone makes an application designed to "compress" files - merge them into one big file. This is usually a windows app for the easy interface. Then the programmer makes a DOS version of the compressor that does the opposite - pulls the files back apart again. The game can then run this extractor internally to unpack the files.