Day: November 20, 2003

Viewing Various Image Formats with VB 6

Here’s some ancient code of mine written in Visual Basic 6 to view different image formats not natively supported (at the time) by VB. Enjoy.

  • PNG Viewer — An ambitious effort to support a major portion of the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) specification using nothing but VB6 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 VB6.
  • 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.