Image Extraction

[mandrix]

thx for the info

some "picture" datablocks aren't followed by "palette" datablock, so i was assuming that they used the last defined palette

But they could in fact use no palette if they're grayscale pictures

And this could be the meaning of the 0x1?? flag

i'll check that after i get my index system to work in shining tools (which should be soon)

c ya

Mandrix

 

[Cyber Akuma]

Cool, heh, sorry I cant help you. Dont know much about this stuff, the extent of my knowledge about hex editing was what I did with the Shining Force 3 Secret Ending....... which I STILL need to find out how to get the sound. Guess ill have to get the game myself, heh.

 

[CyberWarriorX]

Here are some news of my current progress :

ILL_DATA.IDX Format :

- It's divided into 8bytes-wise indexblocks

- each indexblock defines a datablock in ILL_DATA.BIN

- each indexblock is formated like this :

-> [first 4 bytes] * 0x800 = Offset of datablock

-> [last 4 bytes] = Length of datablock

this gives us a total of 517 datablocks in ILL_DATA.BIN

many of these blocks are 0x202 bytes wide. I think these blocks are palette definition :

-> [first 2 bytes] = flag meaning that the datablock is defining the palette (seems to always be 0x104)

-> [remaining 512 bytes] = palette of 256 colors coded on 16 bits (RGB555)

the other blocks with variable size should be the pictures themselves, with 1 byte per pixel indexing the color in the palette

if i'm right about the palettes, then their 2 first bytes should also be a kind of flag (always 0x1?? but different from 0x104)

These flags must have a meaning, but i can't figure it out for now. If the pictures have different resolutions, they also should have their resolution stored somewhere, but it's still to be found

These infos are only what i could guess from browsing the files, so they may be inaccurate

if anyone has an idea about common sega encoding formats (or compression), please let us know

c ya

mandrix

Yeah, that's basically about right. As far as compression is concerned, you'll have better luck just disassembling the main program and seeing if you can find anything from that. Even though the SBL contains a type of RLE compression, I have yet to see a game that uses the algorithm(as explained in one of the official docs, can't remember which one).

As for encoding formats, keep an eye out for 4BPP, 8BPP, and 15BPP.

I have a number of progams with source that basically work with those formats if you don't understand how they work:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/cyberwarriorx/

check out macdecode for 8BPP and bm15bpp for 15BPP.

Cyber Warrior X

 

[mandrix]

just to let you know that shining tools is still in progress (now, i can read the idx correctly and i'm progressing on decoding this shitty ill_data.bin)

for professional reasons, i won't have an internet connection for 4 months, but I'll keep working on it during that time, so i hope i'll have something better to release by the time.

if anyone can get info about saturn file types, please post in here, maybe someone else can continue the hunt !

c ya (not soon)

mandrix

 

[Cyber Akuma]

Bumping this to see if anybody has made any progress or if anybody new can give me a hand

 

[TheXev]

I don't mean to hijack the thread, but has anyone had such luck with Grandia for the Saturn? I am going to need to change some images in it, but haven't seen anything related to textures, other then CyberWarriorX's 16x16 font converter.