Enemy Palettes (ENEMYPAL.DAT)

Palette chunks used for enemy IMC combat sprite rendering. Each chunk defines 16 RGB color triplets remapped into runtime VGA palette slots during combat.

Extension: ENEMYPAL.DAT
Location: Game root
Byte order: LE-8 (byte arrays; no multi-byte integers)
Size: 3,692 B fixed — 71 × 52-byte palette_chunk records
Compression: None
Magic: None
Status: Documented
Source: Wendigo — enemypal.dat.xml; Olemars — colortable.cpp

Canonical source: enemypal.dat.xml (Wendigo’s Darklands repo)

File Layout

Offset 0x00:  palette_chunk[71]  — fixed array of 71 palette chunks

palette_chunk (52 bytes)

Offset	Size	Field	Description
+0x00	1	`start_offset`	Starting palette offset; divide by 3 to get palette index
+0x01	48	`triplets[16]`	16 RGB byte triplets (3 bytes each); each component ÷ 4 for standard RGB
+0x31	3	(unknown)	Ending triplet; purpose unknown

Usage

ENEMYPAL.DAT is indexed by darkland.enm enemy type records:

enemy_type.palette_start — starting index into this file
enemy_type.palette_count — number of usable palettes for this enemy type

During combat rendering, the engine copies the relevant palette chunk’s RGB triplets into runtime VGA palette slots to recolor enemy sprites.

Confidence

Medium-high. Confirmed by enemypal.dat.xml and Olemars’s colortable.cpp.