Metroid Prime .pak format?

[SarahHarp]

Ok thanks, (Heh I was hoping you'd respond, your an inspiration )

[SarahHarp]

What would happen if there wern't any uncompressed files? All the CMDL's start with 1 (=compressed) O_o; Would I have to uncompress them, how would you do that?

[thakis]

Hmm, that won't be easy.
You could compare compressed and uncompressed files of the same file type (for example, "ELSC" in Metroid1). You know that the compressed file has a fixed header, so try to make up a decompression scheme that yields this known header. The compression method could even be some public compression format (zlib, ...).
Another approach would be to disassemble the .dol (dol is a gamecube .exe), step through it in an emulator (dolwin is open source, I don't know if dolphin comes with a debugger) until you find the piece of code that does the decompression and copy it. (yagcd has documentation on the .dol file format).

Good luck ;-)

[BlueFalcon7]

i read somewhere recently about file extensions that windows uses a 3 letter file extension and mac uses a 4 letter file extensions (with exceptions like .dmg and .mp3) so i wonder if metroid prime was made with a mac and then archived for purposes of reducing header clutter, and so it can go into an iso and also for file type help, theres filext.com

[thakis]

Metroid itself doesn't use any file extensions, they are added by mpakdump. And it's not true that windows uses 3 letter extensions - back in the DOS days, only three letters were supported. Nowadays, three letters are the most common, but there are four or more letters as well (.html, .class, .manifest, ...). And .png files have the extension .png on Macs as well.

[BlueFalcon7]

thats sort of what i meant, i was not clear that windows also uses 4 letters but i read in the index of the windows XP help and support center and it says "In the Macintosh environment, a four-character sequence that identifies the type of a Macintosh file. The Macintosh Finder uses the file type and file creator to determine the appropriate desktop icon for that file."

[thakis]

Hey,

I had a some spare time today, and I managed to write a decompressor for the compressed files. It was rather easy, the files are simply compressed with zlib. I attached it to my post which has the other two programs (mpakdump, mtexdump) attached as well (8th post in this thread).

The .CMDL format doesn't look to hard to reverse once it's uncompressed, so give it a shot...if you are interested in computer game file formats, this is a really good opportunity to get started

EDIT: if you see a file which has 0x78da near the beginning, it's pretty certainly a zlib file (with maximal compression).

[Elpenguino]

...and there was much rejoicing. good work, thakis.

[SarahHarp]

Wow, I knew I should've tried zlib... though I thought it couldn't be that easy...

Anyways thank you so much ^_^

--Sarah

[boxing]

I don't have any MP1 files for testing but I do have MP2. The mpakdump tool still works. But the 1_***.txtr files are no longer compressed the same way it seems. The first 4 bytes are still the decompression size but it's like there's no other header info. Any ideas? Or a single MP1 1_***.txtr file for comparision that I could use to see the differences?