CA2 File

What are CA2 files and how to open them

Are you having problems opening a CA2 file or are you simply curious about its contents? We're here to explain the properties of these files and provide you with software that can open or handle your CA2 files.

What is a CA2 file?

A .CA2 file is a Crack Art Bitmap file.

Crack Art Bitmap (med-res) is an image format used by the art program Crack Art for the Atari ST. It stores medium-resolution colour graphics, in which each pixel uses 2 bits for one of four colours. The format allows images to be stored either in raw (uncompressed) form or using a simple run-length and jump-based compression scheme.

This format is created by Crack Art version 1.36 (by Detlef Röttger & Jan Borchers) when choosing its medium resolution mode. Once created, these files are usually loaded and displayed by Atari ST software that understands Crack Art graphics, or converted into other bitmap formats (for example by ST2BMP) for viewing on non-ST platforms.

Files begin with a two-byte magic signature "CA" in ASCII, followed by one byte indicating whether the image is compressed (0 = uncompressed, 1 = compressed), and one byte for resolution (0 = low, 1 = medium, 2 = high). For medium resolution, a small palette of four entries appears, then the image data. If uncompressed, the image data takes 32000 bytes of planar screen memory; if compressed, its data uses a variation of run-length encoding with special escape commands that allow repeating sequences, filling with a delta value, or skipping forward to unwritten screen positions.

How to open CA2 files

Important: Different programs may use files with the CA2 file extension for different purposes, so unless you are sure which format your CA2 file is, you may need to try a few different programs.

We have not yet verified any programs for Windows that work with this specific file format. If you know one, please use the 'Suggest a program' link below. Thanks!

Last updated: August 25, 2026

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