Out of a crying need from several ANSi artists, a new type of file was born, ready to take the Art scene by storm.
This new format is known as eXtended BIN, or XBin for short.
XBin is exactly what it's name dictates, it's an extention to the normal raw-image BIN files which have become very popular among the art scene lately.
The use of the XBin format is more or less the same as for the BIN format. However, XBin offers a far better way to handle the raw images.
The BIN format was introduced into the art-scene out of a need to overcome the limits of ANSi files. Apparantly, the 80 columns wide screen was too constraining for some artists. the BIN format was adopted to resolve this problem.
Being very simple by nature, BIN was quickly supported by several art groups in their native ANSi/RIP/GIF/etc. viewer. Consequently, our very own SAUCE standard. went in for a quick facelift and immediately dealt with one of the main problems imposed by the BIN format.
Being nothing more than a raw memory copy of the textmode videomemory, BIN offers no insight to the size/width of the image. Having nothing more than a BIN file, there is no way to determine whether it's a 80 column wide or a 160 column wide image. SAUCE took care of this by taking the BIN format into it's specifications. Out of the SAUCE attached to the BIN, one was able to determine the correct dimensions of the BIN.
XBIN solves this little matter all by itself, and takes matters even further. Anything BIN can do, XBIN does better.
XBin was designed with certain rules in mind. These were:
The above simple four rules were similarly used when designing the specifications of SAUCE. These basic principles helped get the acceptance of SAUCE as a standard by the majority of art groups worldwide. The premise of SAUCE's success was reason alone to re-use this set of rules while designing XBin.
More specifically to the practical use of XBin, following constraints and ideas needed to be addressed :
To sum things up, XBin was required to handle :
In addition to the set requirements, XBin also offers a simple compression scheme which does remarkably well seen it's simplicity.
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