Search the Community

Hey y'all. My name is thearchivalone. Nice to meet you. For the past two years, I've been tearing into Black Rock Shooter: the Game's files on disc and mostly working from the ground up with almost no outside notes or previous attempts at working with it used. The only part that was exclusively found by another hacker was the RTDP format in which a variant was used in Arc Rise Fantasia for the Wii. For the past five months, I've been decompiling and noting the game's binary inside of Ghidra after reaching a point where viewing the data structures on disc were not enough. About a week ago, I was looking at a format that I had assumed was debug or junk data and came upon one that was a complete raw texture. Then I found how it was implemented and read in the binary, followed it up and am now cracking open entire systems for the engine. Also, my notes can be wrong in some areas. Much of how I am reading things is based on how other developers at the time solved problems in the same space, the flow of the data structures on disc, and how specific parts of the binary handle memory allocation in relation to the flow of that data. My old Quickbms scripts - they work well enough for most of the game's formats; I don't plan to update them all that much for right now outside of fixes and minor improvements. They can use it but at this stage, microextracting everything is not the best way to approach the game assets. My notes (currently going through heavy updates with Engine-specific findings, improvements to formats, and other information) I'm gladly taking contributions. I also ask that any projects that use these in any form or for any derivative works, please credit me somewhere. My main goal is to help preserve a classic abandoned title that has a fan base. Black Rock Shooter as a franchise has been a huge part of my adult life and love in Anime, video games and other media. Thanks for your time. Happy hacking. 😄