How to repaint a car in a custom carset

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As you know, Indycar II comes with a paintkit that lets you repaint any car of the game in the standard carset. But what about new carsets? For that you need three programs: pack.exe, unpack.exe and WinMip, all of which can be downloaded in the Downloads section. Pack and Unpack are needed for packing and unpacking the *.dat file of the carset we want; when such a file is unpacked, a multitude of *.mip files appears — these are the textures. With the WinMip program these textures can be converted to BMP format, then edited in any editor (keeping to the 256-colour palette), converted back to MIP, and your carset's *.dat file packed again.

Suppose our carset is named cars2003.dat and lives in the CARS\CARS2003 folder. Copy pack.exe and unpack.exe into that folder. To unpack the carset file, type at the command line:

unpack.exe cars2003.dat

as a result all the carset's textures are unpacked into a separate folder (for example CARS\CARS2003\UNPACK). Then launch WinMip (a Windows program, you will figure it out), select the MIP you need, convert it to BMP and edit it. After that, convert the BMP picture back into a MIP texture. Then the carset must be packed again. Go into the folder with the unpacked carset and type:

pack.exe cars2003.pck

(PCK is a file with information about the files in the carset; it is created when the carset is unpacked, so that it can be packed back correctly). All done. For WinMip to work you need the files MSCOMCTL.OCX and MSVBVM50.DLL; if they are not in your WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder, download them in the Downloads section and place them in that folder. In principle you can manage without pack and unpack: in WinMip 2.15 the Extras menu has items for unpacking and packing carsets. For reference: the player's own car texture is in the file indy95.mip.