PicPac Use

What is PicPac?

PicPac was released in 1999 as official skin-converting program from Microprose. It gave a great boost to the sim European Air War and today, several thousand new paint schemes for EAW aircraft are available throughout the web. It is a simple command -line parameter converter of PCX-graphics to the EAW skin-artwork format TPC.

First, you have to download the program. I recommend Cord's EAW-Page, as there you can find the package in the Add-Ons section. After the installation you should have a file called picpac.exe and several new folders. They contain the basic artwork for the EAW-aircraft and the terrain. It's best to all files that belong to a particular aircraft before you make your first tests.

I recommend you make, in your main EAW folder, a new folder called "Skins" or something similar. Put all the PicPac-things into this directory.

How do I use it?

I'll explain here the basics of using PicPac and with more experience you will find your personal way and little tricks, I am sure.

The program is, as already said, a DOS command-line parameter dependent program. To use it you need only very limited DOS-knowledge.
Go into your Windows to the Start\Programs\MS-DOS Box, it can be called differently, depending on the Windows ## version you use. If you click the small DOS-symbol, you will see a new Window with black background and white codes, right?

Ok, open your paint-program and modify the skin you plan to do. Save it as 256-colors PCX-file (well, same format as it is basically!) in the same folder as the file picpac.exe is. As an examble I'll use the Bf 109G, the skin-file is called p109gtex.pcx, and should be saved in the same folder as PicPac is. For the following steps, the folder I use is C:\Games\EAW\Skins, but please use in the following always the folder-name you use!

Open your Windows-Explorer and go to the same folder. You'll seePicPac and the 109G-skinfile as PCX-picture. At the moment you have 3 windows open, right? If you start skinning EAW-aircraft, you have to get used to such things......and EAW is not running yet...
So, go to your DOS-Box. It should indicate that you are in the Windows-folder, called C:\Windows. Now we have to go to the folder were picpac and the skinfile is. Type in the following command: cd C:\games\eaw\skins 

Now you are in the skins-folder. We will convert the skin you modified from pcx to the tpc-format used by EAW. Please use the exact parameters and the exact spelling and spaces where they are, otherwise nothing will work.

picpac -p p109gtex.pcx p109gtex.tpc

Yes, that's all. If you switch to your Explorer-Window, you should see now a new file, called p109gtex.tpc. Take this file and copy/paste it into your EAW-directory, like you do usually with other skins and have a look at your modifications in EAW.