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Thank you for creating this resource. I'm in the very early stages of a project to create large screenshot map images from .SC2 city files and the original game data with a bit of Python code, and am having trouble with "read sprite tiles from LARGE.DAT" step of that process.

Using the info from this page, I was able to unpack the master SC2000.DAT file into 399 smaller files, including LARGE.DAT. I'm reasonably confident that my code for extracting everything is correct; all the other data like TXT and VOC sounds is perfectly readable and doesn't seem to start at weird offsets or have junk data.

However it's when trying to parse the tiles in LARGE.DAT using your info in the Sprite File Specification where I run into problems. When I scan the first 16 or so bits of the header, the numbers I get don't make sense:

10 07 04 0F | 0C 02 6B 6B | 10 0B 04 0E
1808 3844 | 1802174988 | 2832 3588

According to the docs, this would mean that there are 1808 entries in the file, that the first one starts at 1802174988 (far bigger than the file itself) and is 3588x2832 pixels big. When I use big endian order, many of these numbers are even bigger.

This led me to believe that my LARGE.DAT data was different from the version from which these docs were written, or maybe even that my SC2000.DAT file is different or that I extracted the data from it incorrectly. Just in case, some info on my game data:

My LARGE.DAT is 638,200 bytes. My SC2000.DAT is from the DOS version of the game, 2,629,981 bytes, with MD5sum 2f982a1f4e6041203d8460a289193766 (though yours could easily vary because there is user-specific data stored in that file, as USER.DAT). Date stamp is 16 December 1994.

I also notice that I have no SMALLMED.DAT or SPECIAL.DAT, as mentioned in the docs - just LARGE.DAT, SMALL.DAT, and OTHER.DAT.
I do however have a .HED file that corresponds with each: LARGE.HED, SMALL.HED, OTHER.HED
However the first several bytes of these .HED files are all 0xff, and don't seem to fit any of the data as described.

Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

Thank you again. If providing this kind of support falls outside the scope of your intent for this project, feel free to close this issue.