"A painstaking three-year project was required to recover the images which were saved in an obscure data format."
Why would the images be in an obscure format? Wouldn't they be IFF?
More than likely, pretty sure he was using Graphicraft in the launch demo where he paints Debbie Harry (or rather, uses the fill tool on a digitised photo).
Even Photoshop can read .iff files iirc. I'm sure a quick post on this forum could have got the pictures converted in an afternoon lol.