Windows Undocumented File Formats

This is a reference for improving on standard Windows (16- and 32-bit) tools. The book enables readers to: optimize file handling, manipulate bitmaps and access compression routines. It should be particularly useful to tool developers, multimedia developers and graphic tool developers. The authors explain Windows file structures, and provide routines on disk for decompressing files and viewing the contents of segmented hyper-graphic files (.SHG) and the Win help file system files (.HFS). It addesses the compression algorithms used by COMPRESS.EXE, EXPAND.EXE and the LZEXPAND.DLL library, as well as the following file formats: multi-resolution bitmaps (.MRB); WinHelp (.HLP); multimedia viewer (.MVB); WinHelp bookmark (.BMK); WinHelp annotation (.ANN); Microsoft's resource compiler files (.RES); and PIF files used by windows to run DOS programs.