BBM Converter

Extract text from brushes and maps (BBM)

Select File
Drop or upload your .BBM file

Online File Converter

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How to extract text from your BBM file

Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your BBM file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert BBM to another file type

To convert BBM files to another format, you need Deluxe Paint or other Raster Image software.

Convert a file to BBM

To convert other file formats to the "Brush Bitmap" file type, you need software like Deluxe Paint or a similar tool.

About BBM files

The .BBM extension represents a collision between retro digital art and modern hobbyist modeling.

1. Deluxe Paint Bitmap (Primary): The most common format (32%) is a legacy Brush Bitmap created by Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint. Widely used in the Amiga and MS-DOS era for game assets and sprites, these files are essentially IFF (Interchange File Format) chunks. The problem for modern users is proprietary lock-in: standard viewers like Windows Photos or Adobe Photoshop cannot natively decode the specific IFF-ILBM chunk structure used for brushes. Opening them requires specialized retro-graphic tools or command-line converters.

2. BlueBrick Map: A significant modern use (12%) is for BlueBrick layouts, a tool for designing LEGO train tracks. These are actually XML text files. The friction point here is that while the file is human-readable text, it does not contain the visual map itself - only the coordinates. You cannot "view" the track layout by double-clicking; you must have the open-source software installed to render it.

Conversion Solutions:

For Images: Convert legacy Deluxe Paint files to PNG to preserve the original color palette and transparency (brush masks), or JPG for general viewing.
For BlueBrick: Use the native software to export the XML data to PDF or PNG for sharing layouts with non-users.
For Gaming: A smaller subset (7%) includes .NET-serialized level maps for games like Barony. These are binary data files intended only for the game engine and generally cannot be converted to viewable formats.

Convert.Guru analyzes your BBM file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted LBM, BM and BM_ files.

FAQ

If you want to convert BBM file to JPG, PDF, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, TIF, WEBP, ICO, CUR, PSD or PSB, you can use Deluxe Paint or similar software from the "Raster Graphics / Layout Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert RAW, PNG, AI, NEF, PSB, DNG, SVG, GIF, EPS, JPG, ARW or PDF files to BBM, try Deluxe Paint or another comparable tool in the "Raster Graphics / Layout Storage" category.

The BBM Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our BBM converter.