Nov 20 2003

Viewing Various Image Formats with VB

Category: Programming

Here are several programs I wrote a while ago in Visual Basic to view different image formats not natively supported by VB or Windows. Enjoy.

  • PNG Viewer -- An ambitious effort to support a major portion of the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) specification using nothing but VB code. This program will display most PNG files (interlaced, alpha channels, etc). It may have some trouble with the most obscure instances of PNG formats, but otherwise it's flawless. Sadly, I've stopped development on it a long time ago (what with the existence of libpng and all...) but it could still be useful for some minor applications.
  • JPG Viewer -- A JPEG viewer written entirely in VB.
  • TGA Viewer -- This offers pretty complete support for the TGA (Truevision Targa) format.
  • PCX Viewer -- Full support for the ZSoft PCX format. Apparently this format is still actually used in some commercial applications (namely Lotus Notes).
  • RAS Viewer -- Full support for the Sun Rasterfile format.
  • PPM Viewer -- Supports the Portable Pixel Map format (ASCII and Binary). PPM files are usually true-color pictures, unlike the PGM and PBM formats below.
  • PGM Viewer -- Supports the Portable Grey (Gray?) Map format (ASCII and Binary).
  • PBM Viewer -- Supports the Portable Bit Map format (ASCII and Binary).
  • FLI Animation Viewer -- This simple program actually plays a FLI animation by dumping it frame by frame. It doesn't really support variable timing, and it doesn't have controls for playback. It just dumps.
  • PSD Viewer -- Moderate support for Photoshop PSD files.
  • SGI Viewer -- Supports the SGI formats .RGB and .BW.
  • CUT Viewer -- Supports the Dr. Halo CUT format.
  • BSV Viewer -- This is a viewer for images that were saved using QBasic's BSAVE command. Only BSAVEs done in SCREEN 13 are supported.

4 Responses to “Viewing Various Image Formats with VB”

  1. n.VIMALATHITHAN says:
    December 16th, 2005 at 4:14 pm

    its very helpful to my development carrier. thank u very much.

  2. J. Clav says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    Hi, Dmitry. Are you familiar with the .IVI image format being used by Palm Firepad? I've looked for solutions to view and convert back to the .JPG file it used to be. Please advice. Thanks very much.

  3. db says:
    April 24th, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    Are you familiar with the .IVI image format being used by Palm Firepad?

    Hmm, haven't heard of that one, I'm afraid. And it doesn't look like there's any info on this file format on the Web. You may be out of luck.

  4. Olli Urrila says:
    May 17th, 2011 at 5:13 pm

    Hi, TGA Viewer would be quite small and simple, very helpful - except it doesn't work... It says "This is not a valid TGA file". Well, it IS a valid TGA file, BUT: the file is in Unicode/ANSI, so it won't accept or show Japanese (and valid) TGA files. That has been a real pain with viewing just every tool, it just won't work. IrfanView with an old plugin (IMHO 4.00 and older) worked, but the new plugin (4.2x) won't work anymore(!). Well, searching more... Or, if you wanted to work a kludge to deal with Unicode TGA files (TGA Viewer v.2.0 :-) They´re thousands and thousands for .TGA Japanese files, in thousands of games. Too bad.

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