[sck] v1.4 for DM2 stuff

[greatstone]

• A new release of the "sck" tool is out (http://greatstone.free.fr/dm/index.html)and can now extract nearly all items from any DM2 graphics.dat files.

It means DM2 Amiga, FM-Towns, IBM-PSV, Mac (en/jp/demo), PC-9801, PC-9821, PC (0.9,1.0(en,fr,ge,demo)), SegaCD, MegaCD.
Previously unknown formats are now successfully extracted (IMG2 new specific compression, IMG10, new palettes, new sounds).
A huge part of the 60000 items (between 3000 and 5000 items per DM2 version...) are user-friendly described to produce extracted files.
Thanks to Kentaro for his help on the DM2 palettes and colors info and Christophe for the basic RAW mapfiles.



Other goodies:

• DM Atari teaser demo draft mapfile
  CSB Atari switch.dat support (thanks Christophe)
  DM2 Amiga lang.ftl support
  COD1 item format support
  DM Amiga 2.1 (en) and 2.2 (en) Atari detection and extraction
  minor updates for DM SNES extraction (thanks again Christophe)
  minor bug fixes

I don't know for you, but it was at least very fun for me to reach this milestone and learn new DM technical tricks.
The definition of "fun" is not the same for everyone, uh?

Regards,
GreatStone.

[Bit]

It's always amazing to see, that the people here may vanish for a year, then come back with a little jewel.
Poor kentaro seems to get a lot of requests lately

[Sphenx]

It's always amazing to see, that the people here may vanish for a year, then come back with a little jewel.

(What brings 6 years of vanishing )

Greatstone, great job! I saw the DM2 extractions and they look ok
OK, you just have to drag n drop the graphics.dat file to the extractor to run it (I was trying to run it from command line without success, missing map file).

Why would you still need a map file for extracting DM2 graphics?

I tested on a custom DM2 gdat and it won't read it. Your check rule is problably too strict.

[greatstone]

Hello Sphenx,

Indeed, this release supports "officially" only FTL DM2 releases.
sck knows the MD5 hash code of each release and is able to use the right mapfile to do the extraction based on this code.

Moreover, I need a mapfile because there are plenty of different file formats used by each release, depending of the platform and the sck is build to be generic, without too much hard-coded stuff. This genericity (is it english?) allows me for example to extract items from R-Type GameBoy Advance or Black Crypt Amiga, but obliges me to describe the items if automatic detection is impossible.
So, for DM2, even after being able to read the first "entries" item of the graphics.dat file, I still need to discover "manually" the right format to use for each items.
Mapfiles are here to describe exactly how to extract each item, based on this first manual work: it is somewhat of a workaround as we are still very far of understanding every bits of all DM2 versions. Finally, I want also to "user-friendly" name each extracted file, all names are included in the mapfile also.

Note that if your custom DM2 graphics.dat is based on a regular DM2 platform/language, with the same type of items at the same place, you can use the mapfiles contained in the sck.jar package.
sck.jar can be opened like any zip file, or by Sun jar utility also.
There is a doc/map directory inside, containing all mapfiles: all DM2 mapfiles are named dm2_<platform>_gd.map
So, choose the right one, copy-paste in the same directory than your custom DM2 graphics.dat, rename the mapfile using "<your_graphics.datfile_name>.map" (ex: graphics.dat.map) then launch the extraction using sck in MS-DOS command-line, and it should work. sck will use by default the mapfile in the same location than the file to decode, before checking in its own internal database, and will not use any MD5 code (unknown for it, as it is a custom one).

If not, feel free to send me the custom graphics.dat and I will have a look myself.

Regards,
GreatStone.

[Gambit37]

Wow, hang on, you mentioned Black Crypt!? Can you extract that too....!?

[greatstone]

Relax!
It is basically the same stuff than the one displayed here, months ago: http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... 56#p109984
Where is my experimental mapfile for BC... Ah! Here it is! 30 items extracted and all the mod music. Not so much and wrong colors...
So, no news but still in my mind.
Actually, I am focused on adding extraction of DM/CSB savegame, all platforms (to deal with CSB mini.dat dungeon and dump savegame).
As usual, it means months of new work after a new release, and the real life in the middle for sure.

G.

[Gambit37]

Oh, I must have missed that before! You're a genius And I'm very patient

[Sphenx]

So, for DM2, even after being able to read the first "entries" item of the graphics.dat file, I still need to discover "manually" the right format to use for each items.

For that, yes, but after, I think you can easily decide what formats to use (between big or little end) for each item; the ENT1 tells you if you have an image, a text, a sound, etc ... But I understand that you want it user-friendly and relies on the map to have the item description.

Note that if your custom DM2 graphics.dat is based on a regular DM2 platform/language, with the same type of items at the same place, you can use the mapfiles contained in the sck.jar package.

The problem is that it doesn't have the same number of items as the regular graphics.dat; it would not pass the MD5 hash?
And I would not rebuild myself a mapfile manually to ... hey wait, I really can generate a custom mapfile as well, I should try that (how stupid one can be sometime ...)

If not, feel free to send me the custom graphics.dat and I will have a look myself.

It will come soon, in a few days I think

Thanks for your replies Greatstone

[greatstone]

@Sphenx: send me the custom graphics.dat, as there are some very experimental features inside, able to "automatically" build a mapfile, after some guess, manual tweaking, and trials. Perhaps I will be able to build myself your mapfile in 1 hour, if entries first item is ok.

@Gambit: my work is basically based on the work of the community (Christophe, Kentaro, Paul, Rain, etc.). So, no genius here but a lot of dedication and some technical skills But, thanks a lot for your appreciation.

@all: I am also searching for talent and idea to decode sound item format for PC-9801 and PC-9821 DM2 graphics.dat files, which are still unknown for the sck.
Who will take the challenge?

G.

[Sphenx]

Regarding PC9821 sound, there is no talent needed, it is SNDA (8bits, signed).
Currently for PC9801 I don't know; could try to apply sort of RLE (SND1) or DPCM (~SND8) ?

[greatstone]

For PC-9821, my first trial has been done with SNDA already but the quality if some sounds was so ugly than I was not sure at all to choose the right one...
It is perhaps SNDA or perhaps somethinf very similar. Will wait to see if some genius are lurking around to help me.

[Sphenx]

I decoded correctly the sounds with SNDA. One word for the total size, then comes the data as 8bits signed. Really, there is nothing more. You should hear the sounds as there are for ST or Amiga.