Okay, Chrono Cross Textures

[Vehek]

A while back at romhacking.net, Cyberman suggested that Xenogears and Chrono Cross might have similar file structures.
http://wiki.qhimm.com/Xeno/IndexFileFormat
Do you think this will help?

[FaustWolf]

This could be a major breakthrough; Chrono Cross definitely seems to have the same deal, what with the SLUS file and SYSTEM.CNF being the only things Windows can see.

I'll see if I can't rip some hex strings from the iso based on that wiki tonight. Others are welcome to try before I get to it, of course. Any ideas on what we would view a Table of Contents with? Just throw it into Notepad, maybe? Terminus Traductions' notes will help here.

EDIT: Before I try to find Chrono Cross' index file, I'm going to try it with Xenogears first so I can get a sense of what I'm looking for. According to the info Vehek posted above, Xeno's index file starts on the 24^th disc sector and is 16 sectors long. I *think* that means it should start on offset DC80 assuming each sector is 2352 bytes long (i.e., 2352 * 24 -> Hex). Can anyone tell me if my understanding of the qhimm wiki entry Vehek posted is correct? I'll see if I can register at qhimm too and ask there for advice.

EDIT: Oh-hoh-hoh. It seems the disc sectors in Xenogears are 2048 bytes long, not 2352 (which I thought was the iso standard). If 2048 is the magic number, then everything seems to be shaping up with what's in the qhimm wiki reference on Xeno. That makes the index file's starting offset in Xenogears C000, BTW. Not sure what it'll be in Cross, though the PlayStation logo model is stored at the same offset in both Cross and Xeno.

Anyone familiar enough with disc sectors to tell me if 2048 sounds like a reasonable number of bytes per sector on a PlayStation CD, and if it's likely that Cross has the same number of bytes per sector?

IMPORTANT EDIT

Okay, I've attached what I think is the Xenogears index file. I didn't put a file extension on it yet; it's raw hex.  I'll leave it with the Community for a few hours to ponder how this can be viewed (as a .dat file, perhaps?) I'll return to the matter once I get a few things done outside the Chrono world.

If this works, then I'll move onto Cross and see if I can find a similar index file.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[FaustWolf]

Ooh, before I forget -

The file above has a very long string of 00 bytes I find suspicious at the tail end of it; I'm not sure if that would affect our ability to view it or not. So if anyone wants to investigate before I return to it, feel free to shave that off the end of the file if nothing seems to work.

EDIT: Tried opening it in notepad under various conditions, but no go.

[ZeaLitY]

Probably not the reply you're looking for at the moment...

I've determined that arranging the layer one stuff is ridiculously futile. I'll still make Perfect and Complete versions of each map, but the Complete image will now feature the layer one stuff as it appears in the VRAM viewer. While arranging it isn't TOO difficult, it is time-consuming because a lot of that stuff is very dark and it can take a lot of guesswork to align it correctly.

Anyway, here are the Complete and Perfect versions of one of Cross's most famous scenes:

[attachment deleted by admin]

[FaustWolf]

I'd forgotten just how beautiful Cross' environments could be. Brings a tear to my eye. Er, well, almost. Nice work as always, Zeality. I wonder if the separate layers for each environment are stored as different files on the Cross CD? That would be sweet if so, because it would allow for slightly different or expanded environments to be made once the Compendium gets to the point of Cross fangames and hacks.

I'm not going to have time to join in on the VRAM dumping frenzy this weekend after all, unfortunately. Anyone who'd like to recapture Cross environments like what Zeality's doing, please see the tutorial on DragonTear.net. I've linked to it already in this thread, but here it is again: http://www.dragon-tear.net/forum/showpost.php?p=188751&postcount=23

In other news, I'm attaching a hex string that might just be the Chrono Cross table of contents. It is significantly different from its Xenogears counterpart; for one thing, it's only 13 sectors long as opposed to 16, and secondly, the byte repeat pattern* happens every four bytes as opposed to every seven bytes. But I believe it may be what we're looking for.

Still no idea on how to open it. I'm still awaiting an account confirmation email from qhimm.com; I think it doesn't like Yahoo. If anyone has an account at qhimm, please inquire there as to how one would go about viewing a Table of Contents / Index file from a Playstation CD.

*Byte repeat pattern: My term for a repetitious pattern within a hex string. For example, a four-byte repeat pattern might look like @...@v..@...@...zd..zx..z, etc, in ASCII. Not completely consistent, but the pattern is still obvious. I'm not quite sure what it means, exactly, other than that the hex string looks interesting.


[attachment deleted by admin]

[ZeaLitY]

Yeah, it doesn't like your Yahoo. I just registered with my Gmail account, and will proceed to post about it.

I also threw out an update of what we're doing on Gamefaqs's Cross board.

[FaustWolf]

Thanks for that Zeality. I'm posting about it on xentax and I'll also toss these at Romhacking.net for what it's worth.

[ZeaLitY]

http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=7133.0

[FaustWolf]

Beautiful. Many thanks, Zeality. My threads at xentax and romhacking.net are the same as always:

http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?p=23412#23412
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,4829.0.html

Hopefully something very, very good will come of all this.

[ZeaLitY]

Interesting. The demo disc has the demos in different folders. Chrono Cross's (folder is named Kid) has this in it:

KID.EXE
CRONO.HED
CROCRO.IMG
TITLE.XAM
BLOOD.XAM
TIDAL.XAM
END.DAT

Anyone know what the hell these are? I tried mounting Crocro.img as a CD, but I could not browse it. Kid.exe just terminates, of course.

[FaustWolf]

Looks extremely interesting. Now, the demo has gameplay and not just video in it, right? I wonder if some of these same files might be on the final. Are any of them small enough to attach, or are they all very large?

[ZeaLitY]

I'll upload tomorrow and edit this post (it'll display the "New" icon on the kajar Labs thread listing). The XAMs are 6 mb each, and then a 16 mb one's in there. The HED is only 30 kb, and the END.dat is like 3 bytes. Crocro.img is 101 MB, and KID.EXE is 1.89 mb.

[FaustWolf]

Anybody read/speak Italian here? I've been directed to this site:

http://www.sadnescity.it/utilita.php
 
by Akari at the qhimm forums. I'm going to try out their program TOC Changer, but I'd be interested to know what their documentation on the program says.

EDIT: Okay, forget that. It appears TOC Changer only changes the Table of Conents file and doesn't view it. Go me.

Anyway, here's a guide in Italian that might prove useful:
http://www.romhacking.it/downloads/guide/saffo/modifica_toc.pdf

The author, Sephiroth 1311, has also posted in English at romhacking.net, so hopefully he'll be a huge help in this area. We're coming along, folks!

[ZeaLitY]

Damn, I can't copy those XAM files from the CD-ROM for some reason. I get "Invalid MS-DOS function".

The others:

http://chronofan.com/Black/Cross/CRONO.HED
http://chronofan.com/Black/Cross/END.DAT
http://chronofan.com/Black/Cross/KID.EXE

And of course, there's still CROCRO.IMG, but I haven't uploaded it. Maybe it'd be easy to find a comparable TOC on a small demo file like this?

[FaustWolf]

I shall take a look at those, Zeality, and see if they're in the final version. Even if the same file's different in the final version, I should be able to detect its existence by looking for the header's hex signature.

I think I've got enough source material for the folks at various other forums to look at regarding the Chrono Cross TOC. I'm not sure where it would be on the demo; my guess is it might start at offset C000 of the full demo iso just as with Xenogears and Chrono Cross.

BTW, http://www.sadnescity.it/ has a whole forum subsection devoted to Cross. Woe unto me that my Spanish isn't helping me out too much with the Italian, or I'd ask there too. EDIT: They've got an English forum, though it doesn't look all that active. I've started a thread there; we'll see if we get any help from Italy: http://lnx.sadnescity.it/forum/index.php?topic=66.msg351#msg351

EDIT: There's an EXE similar to KID.EXE on the final, starting at offset 13000 (for my own information - I'll map it).  I wonder if CRONO.HED might be an index file; I say that only because of the strong byte repeat pattern I'm seeing when I view it in hex.

Actually, while doing a bit of exploration regarding KID.EXE, I found a section of the final iso that reads in ASCII:



Offsets 1F0320 ~ 1F036F. Maybe this is referring to file archives in the iso? Do the extensions .WAA, .WEP, or .KMD look familiar to anyone?