Skip to content

BROWSING.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
156 lines (126 loc) · 7.4 KB

BROWSING.md

File metadata and controls

156 lines (126 loc) · 7.4 KB
Raw

Browsing the extraction — a guided tour

What you have after running extract + classes + browse against the USA disc, and how to poke around in it. Numbers below are from a full extraction of SLUS-20469; yours will match.

out/
  dump/       the disc, unpacked: 8,980 files as the game addresses them
  browse/     the same assets converted to formats your desktop opens
  manifest.csv        one row per extracted object (9,000 rows)
  browse/classes_manifest.csv   one row per lifted Java class

Rule of thumb: dump/ is for tools, browse/ is for humans. Everything in browse/ is derived from dump/ (or straight from the ISO) by decoders described in FORMATS.md.

The three areas of dump/

dump/chain0/ — the game's data\ tree (8,573 files)

This is the world: models, textures, scripts, menus, sound. The game's own path strings (data\scene\ST0010.evt) map 1:1 onto this tree.

Directory Files What it is
scene/ 1,066 field/event scripts — ST####.evt (Java! see JAVA.md) plus decoded-text .txt companions with live dev comments
char/ 868 playable/NPC character models (.lex mesh, .xtx texture, .jnt skeleton)
obj/ 799 scene props (aobj###/…)
map/ 704 field geometry, MC_<zone><nn> naming — zones VOK (Woglinde), DYU, ELS (Elsa), KUK (Kukai), UTA
sound/ 680 .SMD sequences / .SWD wave banks / .SED SFX banks (Procyon Studio formats)
carddata/ 393 the card-game database + 117 card face textures
umn/ 348 U.M.N. email/database mode: .uml entries, event##.txt dialogue
weapon/ 261 weapon models
enemy/ 279 enemy models
motion/ 176 animation packs (.fpk)
movie/ 131 small in-engine .ipu clips (movie/small/mvs####.ipu)
robo/ 65 A.G.W.S. mechs
texture/ 78 shared textures

Top-level loose files worth opening: title.jpg, monologo.jpg (straight JPEGs), namco.ipu / logo_msi.ipu (the boot logos), base.evt / system.evt (the Java runtime — yes, really), hdd.res (HDD-install resources).

The eight staff folders. Episode I's build system published each developer's personal working directory straight to the retail disc. See FINDS.md for the full story; the short version:

Folder Files Owner's beat
simajiri/ 1,227 particle effects — 1,051 .esd + 170 .esp scripts
yamamoto/ 1,211 battle data (1,195 .bin stat tables, one per character) + battle BGM + a few movies
tanaka/ 110 the casino — slots, poker, card art (slot_1.xtx, poker_1.xtx, CASINO.res)
matumoto/ 88 per-zone map parameter .dat files (incl. MC_TEST.dat and testes.dat)
nisimori/ 42 battle result/announce UI (.bxx, .rbg backgrounds)
endou/ 24 menus, shop, skill tree, save screen (savemap.bin, shopdata.bin, etree.bin)
yajima/ 11 title & game-over screens (gameov.jpg, end.jpg, gameover.vds)
karakama/ 2 event items (evtitem.dat, itembox.dat)

dump/chain1/ — streaming data (349 files)

Directory Files What it is
sound/vda/ 103 streamed voice/cutscene audio (s######.vda)
mtnpack/ 109 per-cutscene motion packs (SCE#####.arc + .fpk pairs)
scene/ 92 cutscene Java scripts (SCE#####.evt, chapter-numbered)
movie/mpeg2/ 45 video-only .pss movies

dump/layer1/ — the hidden half of the disc (58 files, 3.9 GB)

The ISO9660 filesystem only describes layer 0 of the dual-layer DVD. All of layer 1 is movies, addressed by raw sector number and invisible to normal ISO tools — carve.py recovers them without any index. Names encode the absolute sector (layer1_047_lba3551180.pss) so the mapping to real titles can be recovered later from the playback code. Sizes run from 2.5 MB (_045) to 208 MB (_047). These are the full-quality cutscenes with audio; they play in VLC/ffplay as-is (video) and convert to proper MP4s with browse --kinds movies.

browse/ — the human-readable mirror

Each browse kind writes one subtree, preserving dump/ paths:

Directory Count From Open with
textures_png/ 1,273 PNGs .xtx (+ sibling .lex palettes) anything
audio/ 104 WAVs .vds/.vdm/.vda streams anything
soundbanks/ per-bank WAVs + smd_catalog.csv .swd/.smd anything
text/ 588 UTF-8 files Shift-JIS .txt your editor
movies/ 247 MP4s .pss/.ipu (needs ffmpeg) anything
images/ 13 JPEGs .jpg on disc anything
classes/ ~2,200 .class .evt FL00 containers javap -c -p, CFR, Krakatau
code/ 19 binaries ISO filesystem (--code) Ghidra / readelf

Highlights per subtree:

  • textures_png/chain0/tanaka/ — 109 casino graphics: slot reels, poker tables, card faces. The single best "wait, this shipped in a folder named after a guy?" browse.
  • textures_png/chain0/carddata/ — all 117 card-game faces.
  • audio/chain1/sound/vda/ — every streamed voice line/cutscene mix as 48 kHz stereo WAV.
  • soundbanks/smd_catalog.csv — every music sequence with its embedded metadata; the titled ones literally credit Yasunori Mitsuda / PROCYON STUDIO inside the retail files.
  • text/chain0/scene/ — event text with the developers' Japanese comments still inline (see FINDS.md for gems).
  • movies/layer1/ — the 58 real cutscenes as MP4; movies with audio also get name.video.mp4 + name.audio.wav splits for undub/redub work.
  • code/ — SLUS_204.69 (unstripped!), five OV*.OVL overlays (also unstripped), and 13 IOP modules including the PS2 HDD/network stack (DEV9.IRX, HDD.IRX, PFS.IRX, SMAP.IRX).

The manifests

manifest.csv (9,000 rows) — columns area,path,sector,size,compressed,usize,bigfile,bigfile_offset. area is one of chain0 (8,573) / chain1 (349) / layer1 (58) / code (19); compressed=1 marks the 2,095 ARX-compressed entries (usize = their uncompressed size). sector/bigfile/bigfile_offset let you find any object back in the raw disc image. verify --out out/ re-checks every row.

browse/classes_manifest.csv — columns area,evt,class,offset,size,sha1,written: which .evt container each Java class came from, at what offset, with a content hash (duplicate classes across containers are deduplicated by sha1; bytecode-distinct variants of the same name get a __<sha8> suffix).

Recipes

# What's the biggest thing on the disc?
sort -t, -k4 -rn out/manifest.csv | head

# Find every file for one character
grep 'char\\\\kosmos' out/manifest.csv

# Read a cutscene script (after `classes` — the tree is flat, inner classes
# as Scene$Inner.class; engine classes under xeno/ and java/lang/)
javap -c -p "out/browse/classes/SCE01012.class"

# Which scenes reference a given voice file? (constant pools are searchable text)
grep -rl 's190024' out/browse/classes/

# Re-decode voice at a different rate for comparison
python cli.py browse --out out/ --kinds audio --rate 44100

# Just the casino art
python cli.py browse --out out/ --kinds textures   # then open browse/textures_png/chain0/tanaka/

For byte-level format details behind all of this, see FORMATS.md. For the disc's oddities and leftovers, see FINDS.md. For the Java event system, see JAVA.md.