Truevision TGA

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Truevision TGA, often referred to as TARGA, is a raster graphics file format created by Truevision Inc. (now part of Avid Technology). It was the native format of TARGA and VISTA boards, which were the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible PCs to support high color or true color display. This family of graphic cards was intended for professional computer image synthesis and video editing with PCs; for this reason, usual resolutions of TGA image files match those of the NTSC and PAL video formats.^[2]

TARGA is an acronym for Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter; TGA is an initialism for Truevision Graphics Adapter.

TGA files commonly have the extension ".tga" on PC DOS/Windows systems and macOS (older Macintosh systems use the "TPIC" type code). The format itself permits any pixel bit depth up to 255, of which up to 15 bits can be dedicated to an alpha channel;^[3] however, the only bit depths supported in practice were 8, 15, 16, 24, and 32, where the 16- and 32-bit formats used 1 and 8 bits respectively for the alpha channel. Color data can be color-mapped, or in direct color or truecolor format. Image data may be stored raw, or optionally, a lossless RLE compression similar to PackBits can be employed. This type of compression performs poorly for typical photographic images, but works acceptably well for simpler images, such as icons, cartoons and line drawings.