Index of procedures

Try the PC Exchange method of converting Windows tilesets to Macintosh (a work in progress)

Windows/DOS/Mac SCURK compatibility tips

Converting DOS SCURK tilesets to Windows

Solving color shifting in SCURK for Windows

Erasing the background in SCURK for Windows

Converting DOS SCURK tilesets to Windows

The process is extremely easy--you basically load the DOS tileset file as you would a Windows tileset file...

1. Start SCURK for Windows
2. Go to the Pick & Copy window
3. Pull down the File menu and select Load...Working object set (you will need to set "Files of type" to DOS File (*.TIL))
4. Once you load your DOS file, a window should appear saying "Translating from DOS"
5. When it is finished, save the new tileset by pulling down the File menu and selecting Save As
6. Save the file as a .MIF

Windows/DOS/Mac SCURK compatibility through images

As of this writing, Maxis has been rumored to be working on a utility for converting SCURK tilesets to work with different platforms. It remains to be seen if and when this utility will come out, so many will have to resort to the outline below.

For now, the only current path for converting raw SCURK tilesets between platforms seems to be from DOS to Windows. Thus, the only way of distributing SCURK graphics between the remaining platforms is to save tilesets in image format. The most universal and reliable format seems to be GIF. You may notice that many sites store their graphics as simple GIF images that are displayed right on the page, allowing you to simply use your browser to save them to disk. However, that's where things get a bit tricky.

At this point, you'll need to convert the GIF image to a format that you can use for importing into SCURK. For DOS, you'll need to convert it to PCX image format, using any number of Windows or DOS paint programs that support multiple image formats. For Windows and Mac, virtually any image format is usable, because you'll be able to simply use your operating system's paste and copy commands. In doing this, you only need to load the GIF into a paint program, and then copy it to the clipboard. From here, you need to paste the image into an empty SCURK tilebase (note: if the colors of graphics pasted into SCURK get scrambled, fix it here). If you are without a decent paint or image editing program, check out www.shareware.com and select to do a search for "paint" and/or "GIF". You can customize the search to look for files specific to your platform. Also, Paint Shop Pro is available from the JASC web site.

The easiest way to erase the background in SCURK for DOS is to select the transparent color from the palette and then use the fill tool to fill in the background. For Windows users, this can get tricky--the equivalent procedure for erasing the background quickly is detailed here. At this point, you can simply save the resulting tileset and use it with SimCity 2000. This is actually more flexible than using tilesets because you have the control of putting each building in the tilebase of your choice.

You can check the tileset archives from the SCURK page for tilesets with GIF images to download.