ROM Hack Translation Help decompressing Wiiware (.wad) files

[eviltrainer]

Hey all!

I'm trying to translate the Wiiware title Castlevania the Adventure Rebirth to my language and I managed to extract all of its contents, but I don't seem to find a way to decrypt what was extracted. Does anyone know how to handle these ".l" files? It's clear they must mean some kind of compression/encrypting because we can see the true filetype in the filenames itself...

We can see in the picture that we have a bunch of psb and a few csv files, but they're actually archived as some weird ".l" file. If that's a noob question, please nevermind me because I am actually a noob at Wiiware rom hacking (in fact, that's the 1st time ever I'm trying this!).

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

 

[XFlak]

If you open one of them in a hex editor do you see LZ77 at the beginning?

Edit: if so, use this tool
https://github.com/xflak/lz77helper

Edit2: or just open one of the files with LZ77 helper and it will say if it has LZ77 encryption or not, if it does u can decrypt

 

[eviltrainer]

If you open one of them in a hex editor do you see LZ77 at the beginning?

Edit: if so, use this tool
https://github.com/xflak/lz77helper

Edit2: or just open one of the files with LZ77 helper and it will say if it has LZ77 encryption or not, if it does u can decrypt

I'm afraid it doesn't have the Lz77 compression. I already tried using ShowMiiWads, Switch Toolbox and Kuriimu/Kuriimu2 to try and decompress it but the former tells me right away the file isn't compressed with Lz77. However, the arc file where this whole list of files is located, does have lz77 in its name.

I also tried uncompressing this arc file with with these tools and ShowMiiWads also returned me a "this file is not lz77 compressed" error.

Post automatically merged: Jul 3, 2024

Just confirmed: Lz77 Helper also states these files aren't compressed. But if they are not, why do the devs named them with the compression name? It doesn't make sense to me at all.

Post automatically merged: Jul 4, 2024

EDIT: So, turns out it was just a simple ZLIB compression!

So, an equally simple and straight-forward python script did the trick!

Although the script still keeps the weird .l extension in the decompressed file, it'll work properly like it is supposed to (in the example above, just a regular and ready to be edited csv).

So, with that taken care of, I'll edit the title of this post with the current status of my request: How do I even start manipulating a .psb file? I can't find the whole game's text inside those few csv files so I'm guessing they're either inside those .psb files (which means they're not a photoshop file like my Google search queries return) or inside other files in the U8 archives.

 

[Larsenv]

If you open one of them in a hex editor do you see LZ77 at the beginning?

Edit: if so, use this tool
https://github.com/xflak/lz77helper

Edit2: or just open one of the files with LZ77 helper and it will say if it has LZ77 encryption or not, if it does u can decrypt

typically the wii menu is the only program which puts lz77 at the beginning of the header otherwise first byte would be 0x11 or 0x10

 

[eviltrainer]

typically the wii menu is the only program which puts lz77 at the beginning of the header otherwise first byte would be 0x11 or 0x10

Well, I have a bunch of LZ77_homeBtn arc files (one for each language and a general one) and it seems they're only named after Lz77 because when I tried to decompress them, all my tools returned an error claiming they're actually not compressed. But there's also a Huf8_HomeButtonSe arc file (the "Se" here stands for sound effects, I suppose?)

Anyways, now I know I don't have to deal with this since it's just a menu thing. What I'm really trying to achieve here is finding the text and textures so I can edit and translate them. So far, I ran into a bunch of files that I simply can't find any info about anywhere. These would be:

.psb files (I'm assuming it's a archive for textures and I need a way to open it. Google search returns it as a Photoshop file but I think it's just a homonym situation)

.ovl

.hrendbsp

.hrenderror

.hrendmesh

.loadcells

.hit

.rnd

.dgf

I'm currently stuck at how to handle these file formats in Wiiware titles, so any help here is greatly appreciated!

 

[eviltrainer]

So, according to Venomalia, the developer of Dolphin Texture Extractor, these psb files seem to be some kind of texture archive with several of them inside. This is what he found out:

I don't have that much time at the moment, but I'll take a closer look.
What I can say so far is that the pointer at 0x14 points to the string tabel.
the pallets are always at the very end of the file, each one is 0x200 in size.

0x0 = uint identifiers; Always 4346704 "PSB"
0x4 = uint version; Always 2
0x4 = uint unk;
0xC = uint pointerToData_0; Always 0x28

0x10 = uint pointerToByteData_0;
0x14 = uint pointerToStringTabel;
0x18 = uint pointerToByteData_1;
0x1C = uint pointerToByteData_2;

0x20 = uint pointerToData_1; Could be raw image data.
0x24 = uint pointerToData_2;

I'm completely clueless on what all of that means since I'm no knowledgeable towards hexadecimal and byte research lol

So, I'm throwing this here in the hopes someone can step up and help to crack this format. Any help is greatly appreciated!