This topic was archived here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000fw_/https://www.zenhax.com/viewtopic.php?t=15113

balcsida, posted Sat Apr 10, 2021 7:20 pm (63314)

---

So there is this older game that I would like to mod (War Front - Turning Point), but all the text files in it are encoded in some way that I can't identify.
It might be something obvious, but still...
As an example, I have the file logsystem2.inf. I choose this file because as a mistake, the game devs left untouched in the Multiplayer Demo version of the game, so I know how the file should look like:

Code:

[: cLogSystem2]
{
   _RefID = 1

   [LogTargets *]
   {

      [: cLogFile]
      {
         _RefID = 2
         Name = "Default"
         Binary = 1
         Opened = 0
         Filter = ""
         BufferSize = 1048576
         AsynchronWrite = 1
         FileName = "ProgLog.prlog"

      }
      [: cLogTextFile]
      {
         _RefID = 3
         Name = "Text"
         Binary = 0
         Opened = 0
         Filter = ""
         FileName = "ProgLog.txt"

      }
   }
}

Using binwalk and offzip I can see that this is a zlib compressed stream and I can even uncompress it, but it is still have some kind of compression that I couldn't identify with anything (see 0000000c.dat attached).
I can see the textual forms in it (e.g. cLogSystem2) but still.

The developers also left a batch script titled converttobinary.bat which seems to do this conversion:

Code:

bc "aaspot.base" B
...
bc "zsakutca.base" B
del *.bak

I tried to find this BC program, but I couldn't find anything on the net, I suspect this is some custom text to binary converter (but correct me if I'm wrong).