Hacking DOL Disassembly?

[Nago]

I was wondering if anyone in here could help get me started on a pet project.

I've got a jumble of files I've extracted from the Animal Crossing: City Folk disc, and a lot of them are what you'd expect: system files, fonts, assets for animations, textures and so on (many of which Brawl Box can view and edit, etc.)

What I am looking for, however, is a way to identify the seasonal data in the game -- just for fun, really!
I know there are many guides with this data available, I am just curious on a technology level how to find and identify it within the binaries (or data files, if it's external.)

I know disassemblers exist and being able to read the actual opcodes might help me differentiate data and executable segments in the binaries (both the dol and the large folder of rels) so I was wondering if anyone in here knows how to get that sort of thing cooking -- I know I've seen ARM disassemblers for the NDS (which I have seen friends use to make trainers etc), but I am not sure if there's anything that will do it for the Wii DOLs (ppc devkit?)

If anyone has tips for me too, I'd love to discuss more! I'm a CS student pursuing my master's, but I'm still pretty new to reverse engineering things -- I'm usually building them up the other way =)

 

[FAST6191]

http://code.google.com/p/hiinks/wiki/vdappc would probably be the simple disassembler. I am not sure what goes as far as having a hacker aimed disassembler outside of IDA plugins though (you should be able to find source code though and that will at least be able to direct you a bit), likewise I have not looked into any binary specific compression (if it has any at all -- the wii has "normal" compressions but also it likes the so called yaz0 and U8 compressions).
If you have learned assembly as part of your studies it would probably have been X86 with maybe a quick aside into ARM. To that end I would suggest a read of http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Assembler_Tutorial as it is subtly different (though the lack of nested variable size registers from X86 is probably enough to make up for any differences).
You might also like http://blog.delroth.net/2011/06/reverse-engineering-a-wii-game-script-interpreter-part-1/ (it is probably still the most advanced thing I have seen done in Wii game hacking thus far).
Though it is for the gamecube if you have not read http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yagcd/yagcd/frames.html I would skim it at least (being a tarted up gamecube most of it applies).