Hacking GAME.DAT in Endless Ocean / Endless Ocean 2

[W hat]

/DATA/BGM/(in-game music in brstm format)
/DATA/Game.DAT (700 MB)
/DATA/Info.DAT (150 KB)
/DATA/Opening.bnr

Viewing Game.DAT with a hex editor reveals what most people would assume - all game-related content is present in GAME.DAT. There's references to .mdl files, /spot/whatever.arc, and so on, but that's all part of Game.DAT. I also found remnants of a debug menu: "ROMver - 6/7 (Fri) I'm so busy, my eyes are spinning, Useful debug functions. Adjust game progression. Advance 13% (After gaining partner)?..." - That poor coder must have been working very hard

.

The Wii is able to handle this file. Does anybody know how I might extract it? I already tried extracting with 7-zip, and as expected it didn't work. I've been wondering if I could extract / decrypt it for a while, and I came to the conclusion long ago that it just wasn't possible.

I've heard that Dolphin shows currently loaded files when playing a game, or something to that effect. I don't think that would help here, because it would just show it's reading from Game.DAT. I don't think SNEEK+DI would help either, but I've never used that either so I can't know for sure.

For example, Info.DAT in a hex editor starts with this:
*ARK_CRV001_DATA

Game.dat starts with this:
RF2MD2
album.vdl
album00.tdl
album.mol

I'm not very optimistic, but any help would be appreciated.

 

[W hat]

Anyone know anything about this? (Doubtful)

 

[s3phir0th115]

You probably already tried this, but just in case.

Examining the header information can sometimes give you an idea on what type of file/archive format you're working with.

For example, opening a PNG file in a hex editor shows, "89 50 4E 47" which is ".PNG" In ASCII

Similarly, for a rar file, the header shows, "52 61 72 21" or "Rar!" in ASCII

Perhaps this format has a header with information you can look up and find a tool to manage.

 

[W hat]

*ARK_CRV001_DATA

or

RF2MD2

It's possibly one of the .arc / .ark file types. It's not Freearc, but I don't have a Linux install, so I can't test the other formats.

 

[s3phir0th115]

*ARK_CRV001_DATA

or

RF2MD2

It's possibly one of the .arc / .ark file types. It's not Freearc, but I don't have a Linux install, so I can't test the other formats.

Hmm.. I'm in Linux and have the games in question. If you could direct me to a tool I might be able to find out.

 

[W hat]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(file_format)

There's some linux tools for decrypting them - the many formats with the .arc names.