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Image Extraction
Cyber Akuma - Jan 20, 2003

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  Cyber Akuma Jan 20, 2003
Ok, I recently got this game, and it has a collection mode where it shows you trailers and official art from the different series of the game, it has a massive illistration gallery (about 200 pics), and I really want to know how to extract them. So far, all the images APPEAR to be located in one file called ill_data.dat (there is also an ill_data.idx file if that helps), are there any tools to extract images in one big file like this? The game I am talking about is Phantasy Star Collection.

Note: I am NOT talking about the in-game images, I realize these would be near-impossible to extract by themselves, I am talking about seperate images they included in an illustration gallery.

Thanks

 Cyber Akuma Jan 29, 2003
Nobody even has any info on how these are stores, what format they are, how I can find out, anything?

 M3d10n Jan 29, 2003
Well, I once extracted all images from the art gallery from Shining Force 3 Premium Disc.

How?

I ran it on SSF, and took screenshots. They were pixel perfect, since the gallery runs at high resolution. I only had to composite the images that were too big to fit the Saturn screen and had to be scrolled.

Maybe PSC runs in SSF? It's a brute force method, but might work.

 Cyber Akuma Jan 29, 2003
That would be very time consuming.

1. Not all the images are the same size, so if I took screenshots there would be black borders around the images.

2. There are over 200 images, removing the black borders one by one would be a giant waste of time.

3. I cant automatically remove all the black borders because the images are all different sizes and even ratios. Some are also color and some straight black and white.

 mandrix Jan 30, 2003
dunno if this could be of interest, but i once developped a little utility in Visual Basic 6 that was able to read some saturn files :

- shining force 3 intro/ending images

- Street Fighter Alpha 2 image gallery

- Cinepak movies (color conversion is still buggy)

It supported real cd-rom or iso files

I also added support for c-written plugins that handled file decoding faster than native vb (c source included with vb source)

If anyone is interested, reply in this thread or mail me at mandrix@nospam.consolemul.com... (without nospam), i'll send you the sources

btw, i'm rewriting it in VB.Net to learn this cool new language, and i'll include new formats if i have time to

 Cyber Akuma Jan 30, 2003
Im interested, but what type of images? The images I know are in one file, you said your program searches the entire cd or iso for pictures to extract? Can it extract only from one file I give it? Either way, I am interested, my E-Mail is Tendo847@aol.com...

 Cyber Akuma Jan 30, 2003
All I was able to get outta that thing was static, static, and more static. Jalf the time it overflowed. Through the interface, it looks like its meant to find one picture file in each file. The file I have is actually many picture files in the same one file.

 mandrix Jan 31, 2003
I warned you, it's far from complete

If you look at Shining Force 3 sc1, there's also a SPR file that contains multiple images, but by setting the resolution correctly, you can see that in fact, it's only one big image

I'm currently re-developping it, and i have Phantasy Star Collection, so i'll see if i can do something about the image gallery (it shouldn't be this complicated, but i need time to re-develop all that's already in the old version)

I'll post the new version when it's ready and stable

NOTE : if you know other saturn games that have an image gallery, please let me know, i'll work on those too

Regards,

Mandrix

 Cyber Akuma Jan 31, 2003
.SPR? Heh, guess I wasnt even looking at the right file.

So you HAVE been able to view the image? What resolution settings did you use?

Glad to hear you are actually working on this game already

 mandrix Jan 31, 2003
Like the name says, it was originally meant to view Shining Force 3 files

Viewable files are *.SPR and *.CPK

For SPR Files, it computes all possible resolutions based on file size

Saturn resolution is sthing like 320x224 (if i remember right), so you should try with numbers similar to this

With this, you can view intro/ending screens, now loading image, character portraits and landscape views when you watch from the tower of duke palsis

For CPK Files, resolutions are stored in the file

You can view the intro and ending movies

Color conversion is heavilly buggy (seems like there are color overflows), and there's no sound

If you want to extract pictures to disk, you can implement a little function using the SaveAsBitmap function in visual basic

For the rest, i just started re-writing it from scratch, so it will take some time before i can view anything, but i'll post it here as soon as it can view and extract some saturn files

c ya

Mandrix

 Cyber Akuma Jan 31, 2003
No no no, I said I did NOT want to extract the in-game pictures. The pictures that I wanted to extract are all the art in the art gallery, not the now loading or in-game art/cutscenes.

 CyberWarriorX Jan 31, 2003
You probably won't find anything using that kind of utility. They're using some weird encoding or it's being compressed on the disc. You can find the current image being displayed if you do a vdp2 ram dump though. Just use some kind of tile viewer that supports standard 8BPP, set it to 8x8 and you should see a somewhat garbled tiled version of the image.

Cyber Warrior X

 Cyber Akuma Feb 3, 2003
Errrrr................

In english please? XD

 TakaIsSilly Feb 3, 2003
If you can bear their QuickBasic nature, the TakTools package in the misc section can read files in large chunks... I belive I even trown a 8x8 tile decoder in the package ^^;

 TakaIsSilly Feb 3, 2003

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by Cyber Akuma@Feb. 03 2003, 1:09 am



Errrrr................



In english please? XD


He means : "Dump the VDP2 memory from a real saturn(using a PAR/AR) and then use an ordinary tile decoding program to see the pictures". This isn't practical for 200 images though

 Cyber Akuma Feb 4, 2003
I saw no *.spe files on the cd

Also the ill_data.bin file is the largest file on the root of the cd, so it HAS to be the image gallery, all the other files are either in directories for each game in the collection or barely even a meg. There is also a Ill_data.idx. Likely some tpe of index/catalog file for it. Think that can help in any way?

 mandrix Feb 4, 2003
ok, i've finally finished downloading PSCollection

Has i don't have my saturn at work , could you tell me how many pictures are in the gallery

I can see some kind of logic in the idx file, but it would be better for me to rely on accurate info.

cya

Mandrix

 Cyber Akuma Feb 4, 2003
Theres a PS, PS2, PS3, and PS4 gallery

I forgot how much exactly are in eahc gallery, PS and PS2 have about 20 each, PS3 has around like 30/40. PS4 has like 150.

 mandrix Feb 6, 2003
Here are some news of my current progress :

ILL_DATA.IDX Format :

- It's divided into 8bytes-wise indexblocks

- each indexblock defines a datablock in ILL_DATA.BIN

- each indexblock is formated like this :

-> [first 4 bytes] * 0x800 = Offset of datablock

-> [last 4 bytes] = Length of datablock

this gives us a total of 517 datablocks in ILL_DATA.BIN

many of these blocks are 0x202 bytes wide. I think these blocks are palette definition :

-> [first 2 bytes] = flag meaning that the datablock is defining the palette (seems to always be 0x104)

-> [remaining 512 bytes] = palette of 256 colors coded on 16 bits (RGB555)

the other blocks with variable size should be the pictures themselves, with 1 byte per pixel indexing the color in the palette

if i'm right about the palettes, then their 2 first bytes should also be a kind of flag (always 0x1?? but different from 0x104)

These flags must have a meaning, but i can't figure it out for now. If the pictures have different resolutions, they also should have their resolution stored somewhere, but it's still to be found

These infos are only what i could guess from browsing the files, so they may be inaccurate

if anyone has an idea about common sega encoding formats (or compression), please let us know

c ya

mandrix

 Cyber Akuma Feb 6, 2003
Careful about the pallete, some of the pictures are black and white, dont know if they are still stored with a color pallete or a monocrome one.

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