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Risae, posted Sun Feb 24, 2019 7:08 am (45237)

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Dear Community,

a few years ago i asked for assistance in extracting the Growlanser VI: Precarious World .dat files:

https://zenhax.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1800

with this i was able to

1. unpack the ISO using the tool "Xpert"
2. Unpack the ".dat" files using quickbms with "Growlanser.bms"
3. edit the files that contain the japanese texts with a HEXeditor that supported SHIFT-JIS
4. repack the modified file into the ".dat" using quickbms with "Growlanser.bms"
5. repack the ".dat" files into an ISO using Xpert

The result is this:



I managed to sort of figure out how the files are build up, and how the pointer tables work.
At the beginning of each file there are rows which tells the file how far away (starting the count from the very beginning of the file) the SDF Pointer table is, in this picture there are 2 SDF Pointer tables.

Position of the SDF pointer tables
https://i.imgur.com/UzAIEPw.png

Start of the pointer table
https://i.imgur.com/AxWe94H.png

After the start of the SDF Pointer table, the next few bits are telling the pointer table where the pointer table ends, and where the text table ends.

From the beginning of SDF until the complete end of the pointer table
https://i.imgur.com/sInbwHv.png

From the beginning of SDF until the end of the text table
https://i.imgur.com/cElNQWG.png
https://i.imgur.com/Jb5xyI2.png

Each text pointer tells the game where the text starts
https://i.imgur.com/0xJuw8L.png

I am pretty sure there are more pointers which i couldn't figure out yet, but this is as far as i could come for now.
My question is: how should i tackle the pointer table problem?
Right now i cannot increase or decrease the amount of text in a "text box", because if i go over or under the original limit the other text pointers would point to the wrong start of the text (and all of the texts that appear beneath it).

Does anybody know of a program that might help me with this, or a good programming language in which i could create a logic that would automate the pointer editing for me?

Thank you for your assistance.

Risae, posted Sun Mar 10, 2019 8:26 am (45660)

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Update

Found a solution: The programs called "Cartograph" and "Atlas".
Currently in the process of getting it to work with the help of the romhackers community:
https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index. ... #msg372282