colwin Reference
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Guide

What is in each file

What is in each file

A complete install is 64 files, 16,371,559 bytes. Three quarters of it is artwork in eleven data DLLs; an eighth is speech and sound effects.

Kind Files Bytes Share
COLDATA*.DLL — art and tables 10 12,181,504 74.4%
COLTEXT0.DLL — the game’s text 1 419,328 2.6%
*.WAV — speech and effects 44 2,034,037 12.4%
COLONIZE.EXE, SETUP.EXE 2 1,241,344 7.6%
COLONIZE.$00 — the pre-patch executable, compressed 1 448,483 2.7%
AMER2.MP, AUTO01.SAV 2 38,119 0.2%
COLWIN.PRF, SETUP.INF, INSTALL.LOG, README.TXT 4 8,744 0.1%

Everything with resources in it — every .DLL and both .EXEs — is a Win16 NE module, and they all have the same shape: header and segments at the front, then every resource in one contiguous run to the end of the file. See the container format.

The program

COLONIZE.EXE — 1,227,264 bytes

The game. 34 segments (19 code), built with Borland C++ 4.52, linked for Windows 3.10, importing WING, COMMDLG, GDI, KERNEL, MMSYSTEM, USER and WIN87EM. Its 42 resources are the Windows interface chrome only — no game art lives here:

Type Count Ids
RT_BITMAP 6 301–306, all 32×32 at 4 bpp
RT_ICON / RT_GROUP_ICON 4 / 4 32×32 at 8 bpp
RT_CURSOR / RT_GROUP_CURSOR 12 / 12 32×32 at 1 bpp, with hotspots
RT_MENU 3 128–130
RT_DIALOG 1 400

This is the patched build: it carries five Assertion failed strings that the original release does not, and one extra code segment. README.TXT describes the patch as fixing “recurring lock-ups” and Windows 95 compatibility.

COLONIZE.$00 — 448,483 bytes

An ARCV archive holding the game’s original, pre-patch colonize.exe: 1,175,040 bytes of valid NE executable, 33 segments (18 code), no assertion strings. LZHUF compressed — adaptive Huffman over an LZSS window. See the ARCV format.

Two shipped builds of the same program from the same toolchain, laid out differently by the linker, is unusually good material for validating a byte comparator.

SETUP.EXE — 14,080 bytes

The INSTWRAP installer, which carries the ARCV reader (its strings include Not an ARCV file, Incorrect ARCV version, Incorrect file checksum) and the LZHUF decompressor the archive format was read out of. Three resources, all icons.

SETUP.INF — 1,145 bytes

The installer’s own script, signature INF2, compressed. Not decoded here.

INSTALL.LOG — 2,073 bytes

Plain INI text listing every installed file against its destination path (coldata0.dll=c:\colwin\coldata0.dll, …). Written at install time; the game does not read it.

README.TXT — 5,114 bytes

The patch’s cover letter, ASCII with CRLF line endings.

COLWIN.PRF — 412 bytes

Preferences, binary, structure UNKNOWN. COLONIZE.EXE opens it by name.

The art: COLDATA0 – COLDATA9

Ten modules, 12.2 MB, holding four private resource types — SPRT sprites, CVPC canvases, CTAB colour tables and one FLIC animation — plus four record tables whose layout is unknown. The developers’ own names for these types come from each module’s RT_NAMETABLE.

Totals across all ten: 915 SPRT, 96 CVPC, 43 CTAB, 1 FLIC.

On sprite colour. A CVPC carries its own complete palette, so its colours are exactly what the game shows. A SPRT does not: its pixels are indices into a palette that is built in memory at startup and overwritten at runtime, so sprite colour is partly reconstruction. Palettes explains what is known and what is not.

COLDATA0.DLL — 733,696 bytes, 534 resources

530 SPRT, ids 5000–7009 — the calligraphy of the Declaration of Independence, one stroke per frame. They fall into exactly 53 groups of ten consecutive ids, all 54 pixels tall, on 26 distinct canvases (16×54, 19×54, 14×54 and 27×54 are the commonest). Ten frames per letter.

The two unknown header words support that grouping independently: read as one 32-bit counter, the value is non-decreasing inside all 53 groups and every one of its 52 decreases falls exactly on a group boundary.

Also 2 CVPC (640×480, 8 bpp) and a single TEXT resource, id 666.

COLDATA1.DLL — 1,130,496 bytes, 26 resources

25 CVPC, the widest mix in the game: eleven 640×480 full screens plus 32×32, 28×28, 60×20 and 200×300 pieces, at 3, 5, 7 and 8 bpp.

CVPC 201 is the 1280×480 reference sheet — unit figures, ships, terrain tiles, forest overlays and production symbols ruled off into 222 cells by an orange (255,132,0) grid on grey. Its loader blits one of the two 640×480 halves whole, never a cell, so it is a two-page reference picture rather than a runtime atlas. The encyclopedia art is cut out of it positionally, which is why those pictures are labelled inferred and not code.

COLDATA2.DLL — 1,312,256 bytes, 16 resources

15 CVPC, all 640×480, at 6 and 8 bpp. Full-screen scenes.

COLDATA3.DLL — 1,485,824 bytes, 26 resources

19 CVPC — twelve at 253×203 and seven at 640×480 — and 6 SPRT, ids 125–130, all on a 155×391 canvas: six poses of the King, drawn through a CTAB.

COLDATA4.DLL — 1,217,536 bytes, 41 resources

18 CVPC (ten 640×480, eight 253×203) and 22 SPRT, ids 1000–2020, on wide short canvases — 632×58, 445×55, 535×58 — the banner strips, plus one 640×480 sprite.

COLDATA5.DLL — 1,653,760 bytes, 199 resources

The animation module: 192 SPRT, ids 9001–9200, over 18 canvases, the commonest being 118×69 (54 frames), 73×73 (21), 83×66 (18) and 103×67 (15). 102 of them carry the unknown signed header pair — more than any other module.

Two CVPC: one 640×480 and one 1920×480 panorama.

It also holds the four record tables, one each: SHIP 9500 (2,808 bytes), CRED 9501, MONS 9502, CRDS 9503. Their layout is UNKNOWN; colwin carries them through untouched rather than shaping them into a plausible-looking table.

COLDATA6.DLL — 1,394,176 bytes, 108 resources

97 SPRT, ids 350–724, the most varied set in the game — 45 distinct canvases. Two runs inside it are bound to game data:

Also 10 CVPC, five of them 640×480.

COLDATA7.DLL — 1,380,352 bytes, 2 resources

One resource and its name table. FLIC 9600 is a stock Autodesk FLC: 640×480, 8 bpp, 66 frames at 71 ms, 1,369,704 bytes inside a 1,370,112-byte resource. The content is the Declaration-of-Independence celebration outside Independence Hall, which pairs it with WINFLC.WAV.

COLDATA8.DLL — 1,670,656 bytes, 105 resources

The colour module. All 43 CTAB colour tables live here, ids 111, 210–215, 220–223 and 260–291 — the same four bases the code computes colour-table ids from at runtime.

61 SPRT, ids 100–291, in two clearly different groups: nineteen on a 32×32 canvas — ids 101–111 among them are the heraldic tiling patterns, rampant lions, fleurs-de-lis, crowns and hatching on solid nation-coloured grounds, drawn with palette indices 221–238, inside the CTAB window — and large portraits up to 284×337. Because these ids sit inside the CTAB id range, these are the sprites whose colour reconstruction is best supported.

COLDATA9.DLL — 202,752 bytes, 33 resources

The smallest data module, and the only one mixing text with art: 19 named TEXT resources (AMERICA, ARTISTS, BADGUYS, CREATE, DANGER, DEBUGOPTIONS, FORCED, FOREIGN, …), 7 SPRT banner strips (633×59, 536×59, 446×56, 261×59), 5 CVPC at 80×50 and 7 bpp, and one CRED table.

The five canvases, ids 780–784, are the music-player transport buttons in order: play, pause, stop, fast-forward, rewind.

The text: COLTEXT0.DLL — 419,328 bytes

717 TEXT resources, every one of them named — ABANDON, ACTIONS, ALREADYHAVE, APACHE, … — which is how the game resolves them: 453 of these identifiers appear as literal strings in COLONIZE.EXE.

This is the game’s entire authored text: dialogs, prompts, the Colonopedia, the Founding Father biographies. Not all of it is prose — some resources are data tables in text form, such as ARAWAK, a list of map coordinates giving the Arawak villages’ starting positions. Part of the scenario lives here, not just the wording.

See the TEXT format for the directive and markup language.

Sound: 44 .WAV files — 2,034,037 bytes

Every one is a plain RIFF/WAVE file, PCM, mono, 11,025 Hz, 8-bit — 184.3 seconds in total. No container tricks; any audio editor opens them, and colwin leaves them alone.

They group by name into anthems and ceremony (ENGLAND, FRANCE, SPAIN, DUTCH, AMEN, POMP, 1812, LIBERTY, MEETKING, MUSPARTY, GOLDCITY, CRACKER1–4), gunfire (BIGGUN, LILGUN, CANNON0, CANNON1, GUNS, GUNCOCK, COCKGUN, GUNWHOOP, WHOOP), explosions (BOOM1–4, BIGEXPLO, LILEXPLO, EXPLO1), movement (HORSES, WHPHORSE, HORGNWHP, WGNSTOP, DRAGOONS, BOARD, SHIPSINK), work and impacts (HAMMERS, FIRE1, ARROW, BLTDIRT, BLTH20) and WINFLC.WAV, which accompanies the FLIC.

Game data

AMER2.MP — 12,534 bytes

The Americas map: 58 × 72 tiles in three planes. Every byte is accounted for — 6 + 3 × 58 × 72 is exactly the file size. Rendering plane 0 draws North, Central and South America, the Caribbean chain, Florida, the Gulf and Baja California. See the .MP format.

AUTO01.SAV — 25,585 bytes

The one saved game that ships. Magic COLONIZE\0. Its structure is solved from the save routine itself — 57 write calls accounting for all 25,585 bytes — and it carries the same 58 × 72 dimensions as AMER2.MP at offset 0x0c. What the fields mean is open. See the save format.