This isn't to be confused with Mah Jongg by Nels Anderson.

I'm also hacking that one, but not in THIS thread.

so I'm building a tool to convert the tile files to PNGs.

The files are TIS files, which are made of:
1. one metadata string
2. 44 TIL files.
3. PAL.CFG

There's PAKTIL.COM and UNPAKTIL.COM to separate out/rejoin the TIL files. So I gotta figure out how TIL files work.

it turns out they're a 6-byte header and then they're a 48x60 image, but they're vertically planar: The first row is the least significant bit, fourth row is the most significant bit, and so on.

This indexes into the palette, which is stored in PAL.CFG

PAL.CFG is simple: It's a 16-line text file, each line containing 3 numbers separated by spaces.

As is common for VGA-only software, it's 6-bit VGA, so the RGB is 0-63 instead of 0-255

the DRAFTSMN.DOC file explains some of the special palette entries:

0 is used for the screen background
1 is used for tile backgrounds
7 is used for the tile edges
11 is used for numbers
15 is used for menus

so really you get 11 colors.

some very ugly python code using strings rather than some smart bitshifting code, but it worked first time.

now I just need to wrap this up into a script that unpacks each file one by one, then converts each TIL, then merges them together into a spritesheet

I made the foolish mistake that all tilesets would define a remotely sensible palette

that was a mistake. several of them do black on black text

who thought this tileset was a good idea? because they were very wrong.

it's tiled "Carol, Cheryl and Christie" and I have no idea who those women are.

that's Carol Alt, Cheryl Tiegs, and Christie Brinkley.

thanks to @ann3nova@corteximplant.comm