What is the format of a 24bit pcx file excluding the header. How is the actual data formated. Actually i have to draw the 24bit bitmap to a 16bit screen so i would really appreciate it if you can tell me how to convert from 24bit to 16bit and still get the same picture. -Thanks

Try www.wotsit.com. Next time, please serch though the posts first. The last 6 months ought to cover most questions. Just click on "Message Board" on the left side of the main page, then "search" on the right end of the greenish text at the top of the next page.

Okay...Next time i will do that...Thanks

Truecolor pcx organization in a nutshell:
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you have a series of pixels that you want to encode in PCX. each of these pixels is 3 bytes: Red, Green and Blue. the way the pcx file works is by breaking a row of pixels into its color components. lets say your screen is 640 pixels wide. each row is treated like this: 640 bytes of red, 640 bytes of green, 640 bytes of blue. the encoding for each of these 640-byte "strips" is done using the normal RLE-style used for 8bit pcx images (im not gonna explain it here).

so, for each row, you need to break a series of pixels into their color components, encode them separately, and store the encoding in the file. why did they do it this way? anybody''s guess.

this typically gives only average compression, on the order of 20-30% compared to BMP files. on the other hand, it is very simple.

Thank you for your replyes...It relly helped me alot...

Drawing a 24bpp image to a 16bpp screen is easy, if you don''t mind the speed. Put your image in a HBITMAP object and then use HDC to blit it to the screen for you. HDC automatically converts it at blitting time.