aww man i loved that game! ^_^

I am working on exporting all the art for Abuse!

The repo at http://abuse.zoy.org/ contains spaint.exe (Satan Paint), a weird little DOS sprite editor. I dug out some documentation on it (see archives at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/graphics/draw/!INDEX.html ) and found these two crucial commands:

Command 1: open the file ant.spe (or whatever .spe file you want) in spaint (this is done via command line)
spaint ant.spe

Command 2: inside spaint, write out all these image files to PCX format
hit / to bring up the command menu, and input:
with all write_pcx

The result is a bunch of indexed image that can be opened in GIMP. The color at index 0 is the background and can safely be deleted or made transparent. The images seem to be exported at a larger size (320x240) so they would also need to be cropped to be useful.

It will be a bit tedious but I should be able to get all the images as PCX. Then it's a matter of more scripting or tedious work to combine the images into sprite sheets.

(edit)
the ImageMagick script I used:
montage -trim -geometry "1x1<" * sprites.png

Then in GIMP I convert any white or black-index-0 areas to alpha 0.

Dang pfunked, I just went and began to reverse engineer the file formats because I couldn't find that program: http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/4776/atlas.png

Doh. I should have downloaded the archive to see what was actually in it rather than only look at the preview if things were missing. Good job pfunked! That must have been tedious :)

ceninan you should post a write-up (with code) of what you found about the .spe file format. Don't know what other old art might be locked away in .spe format

@pfunked I'll try to at least document the bytes, but I'm not done yet :D

As I'm continuously discovering more about the formats I've moved info and discussion here: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/abuse-art-and-fileformats

That game was a gem and pretty unique when it came out. Played it for days, and it was even easy to build new levels for it.

Art in it was great, still is. Parts of it are very moody.