ROM Hack Help extracting files from Poptropica Adventures?

[nicko_dev]

Hi! I'm trying to extract files from a game named Poptropica Adventures, but I can't find any in the game's NDS file! When I open it in Tinke, only the following files are listed:

resdata
resindex
sound_data.sdat
ftc/
    arm7.bin
    arm9.bin
    banner.bin
    fat.bin
    fnt.bin

I don't have much experience with these sorts of things, so I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if all the game's files are combined into the few listed above. Tinke seems to work fine with other games like New Super Mario Bros., and when I play Poptropica Adventures in DeSmuME, the RAM contains filenames for files that don't exist. This is an Other Ocean Interactive & Ubisoft game, and I don't know if this same issue is present in their other games. Any help with this would be appreciated.

 

[FAST6191]

What is in the overlay folder (if there is one)? Some games will stuff everything into overlays and load it that way.

Otherwise we do occasionally see games like this (possibly Trauma Centre, one of the Tony Hawk games, I think a Star Wars one, Touch Detective was one), they will usually leave the sound (this is the SDAT file there) outside it and everything else gets stuffed into one big archive file the game itself knows how to reference.

In this case
resdata
resindex

These would be what I look at first. Going back the names I would guess resdata (res possibly being short for resources) is going to be the big one and resindex is going to be far smaller. In that case it is more likely the smaller file is a list of file sizes and locations (possibly names, subdirectories and other stuff as well) and the other is the file data itself.
You get to compare them to each other and figure out what might go. Bonus is much of the time devs doing this will not be coding their own formats so you likely have all sorts of things like are detailed in http://www.romhacking.net/documents/469 to look at (though it might also be compressed, in which case files will probably start with a 10 or 11 in hex, maybe 40 as it was quite late in the day when this was released. https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/826/ the LZ stuff being able to handle that).

Doing much with this sort of file other than extraction (which you can pair up something like filecutter with a batch file) can be hard if you don't program your own tool or module for one of those programs that supports custom user made modules (tinke had a few options last time I looked).

You may still find useful information in the arm9.bin; smaller games, and sometimes menus or other small portions of the overall, often store text or maybe a level or character info in it.