The amount of energy put into reversing games is incredible. This is real passion combined with expertise. Similarly skilled people unlocked Photoshop or MSO decades ago (and certainly still do where possible). Given that I have shifted my focus to OSS a few decades ago this gives me nostalgic feelings but I am also happy not having to regularly fight against software vendors and their ideas of software distribution.

I've done few formats myself. Nothing complicated. But once you do one, all others are essentially the same. You need length of data, data itself and then likely version and magic bytes for identification purposes. With those few details you can do essentially anything.

For example, one format I use is just to concatenate multiple files into a single one, I use it to group video timeline seeker images into one file - it is faster than using archive or tar/gzip. Another one is a format that concatenates AES-GCM chunks into a single file, which allows me to have interrupted writes and it also supports seeking and streaming of reads.

These things are quite useful, but there is no general use(like gzip/tar). Usually there is some specific functionality needed, so they have to always be written from scratch.

> # Why??????

> The CPU wasn't terribly slow for the time, but wasting cycles would have been noticed.

> Compressing data means you save space on the disc...

While wasting cycles isn't a good thing it's even worse if you are wasting those cycles by not using them because you are waiting for a sloooow media.

And while you can invent a compressed format for the every asset type you have it would be really easier to just compress the whole thing a let the compressor to do the magic.

NB: I still somewhat remember the original SC and it was like 'future is now' with all those glorious shadows and sunshine blooming.