Hacking How to view animation files given nonstandard .bin formats

[AnonymousWaddleDee]

Hello, I've posted here a few times before, and I appreciate the help I've gotten.

I'm working on Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (DS version), and I have a rip of the animation files in the game. The animation files are in .nanr format, which is good and standard, but everything besides those in the folder are .bin files. Everything is decompressed, but the .bin files don't have any magic IDs. I'd like to view the animation files in Tinke, but in this situation I don't know how.

I came across this thread: https://gbatemp.net/threads/editing-sprites-in-nds-rom-with-bin-files.558987/
that suggested that the .bin files might just be an alias for another file format, but if that's the case here, I have no idea which file formats they'd be (palettes, tiles, etc.), because they don't have magic IDs. The way most of the folder is structured is that ever .nanr file is followed by two .bin files.

My question is, given this situation, how can I figure out what the .bin files actually are, and then how can I use Tinke to view the .nanr files using the information from the .bin files?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Fishaman P]

The .bin extension is especially used when someone has created a completely custom format. If it doesn't contain a header (or footer!) with magic words, then you usually have to resort to reverse engineering. The game ROM contains code to unpack/convert/display these files, so it's your job to find this code, decompile it, and ideally reimplement it in well-documented code that makes sense. If you're lazy, I guess you could just use the decompiled C function as-is. That will give you a decompressor directly, but long-term it's a good idea to document the format.