Chrono Cross .BIK files -- any experience with these?

[FaustWolf]

BREAKING NEWS EDIT: As of Sunday, October 14, 2007, we and the folks at the xentax forums have come to agreement that the .BIK archives are in fact "false positives." In other words, we have not yet discovered the archives Square stuffed its Chrono Cross files into. But the search continues in earnest for ways of getting at the insides of the Chrono Cross .iso.

SUPER EDIT - 10/13/07: Okay, I'm re-invading my first post to provide myself with some organization and to "cut to the chase" for Compendiumites who are wading through this the first time. My sincerest hope is that this whole .BIK occurrence is going to result in the "mapping" of the Chrono Cross CD file structure. For this lofty goal to occur, we'll need three things as I see it currently:

1. *COMPLETE* A very good hex editor. Hex Workshop is the utility of choice here, but a great alternative is Cygnus. Its search feature takes some getting used to, but is actually quite a bit more powerful than Hex Workshop's IMHO. If anyone else would like to download Cygnus and help out here, find the Hexit hex calculator as well, since Cygnus doesn't have as good a "goto" feature as Hex Workshop does. *Thanx Luminaire85!

2. *COMPLETE* A .TIM viewer that can rip .TIM files and output them in their native format. PSicture rips .TIMs and outputs them as .BMP files. Clean .TIM rips will provide us with hexadecimal references for exploring the Chrono Cross iso and the .BIKs -- provided the image data isn't compressed in its pre-ripped state. *Thanx Zeality!*

3. A PSX emulator with debugging capabilities a la SNES9x Debugger. Does such an emulator even exist? If it's out there somewhere, it might tell us which disc sectors the emulator is reading at any given point in time. Therefore, perhaps we'd be able to tell where on the disc/iso pre-rendered backgrounds and character models are being pulled from.

All of the above is intended to give the Chrono Community access to Chrono Cross' resources. We've got textures already, though Zeality and I strongly suspect we're missing some of those. Let's push onward and get model data!

This idea has only just developed over the past few days, and in many ways I still don't know what the heck I'm doing. I've dabbled in each of the necessary aspects of this blossoming project, but I've been here long enough to know that more gifted Compendiumites have far greater expertise in these sorts of things than I. If you're reading this and can provide advice or have ideas on how to proceed, by all means join in! Hopefully this will be a long-term Compendium project that will occupy Chrono fans for a while, and if we're successful in ripping models and the like, it will usher in a new age of Cross hacking or Cross-based fangames.


Original post and edits appear below:

Hello again everybody! I swear I'm not trying to up my post count by spamming this section of the forums!

I recently decided to throw my Chrono Cross iso at a program called "Filestripper" produced by the xentax community. I *don't* recommend anyone else do this because it takes a God-awful amount of time and will tie your PC up for hours. Anyway, I can see that I've gotten about 420MB worth of ".bik" files so far. I assume it's an archive of some sort, and I've got three such archives (still running Filestripper, but I don't expect to get any more such archives based on the way things are progressing).

Has anyone here encountered / produced .bik files before? Any ideas as to what they might contain? My cursory Google search suggests that .bik files usually contain music and/or video, but I sincerely doubt that Chrono Cross' soundtrack and its videos combined would take up 2/3 of an entire disc -- unless Filestripper has somehow bloated the file sizes by converting Chrono Cross' music and FMVs into some weird lossless compression format. I dunno.

I'll upload them via Rapidshare for interested parties once Filestripper finally finishes. It's taking its good ol' time, so that won't be until tomorrow morning in my neck of the woods.

Here's to hoping it's something interesting and that we can find out how to open them! I don't want to give anyone false optimism though. It could be 420MB of unusable junk data too.

EDIT: Just thought of something. Filestripper's been giving me a gazillion "Invalid MPEG frame found @ such-and-such an address" messages. Maybe the program's stuffing its error logs into .bik files and that's the source. I hope not; that would be Teh SuX0Rz. I guess we'll see.

EDIT: Finally had to abort the program before it finished due to the need to get some work done today. I've uploaded the .BIK files in separate rars, which people may grab at Rapidshare below:

http://rapidshare.com/files/62248175/Track_010AAF37EB.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/62269095/Track_0113E96864.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/62272980/Track_0100563BCC.rar.html

Filstripper's readme says it can rip .BINK files, which come from Rad Game Tools (http://www.radgametools.com/default.htm). Though quite frankly I'm unsure as to whether or not this has anything to do with .BIK files (I most definitely captured .BIKs and not .BINKs, at least that's what my computer says).

RadGameTools says they've contracted with 1100 customers since 1999, and Squaresoft isn't on their partial list of companies. Knowledgeable Compendiumites, when was Chrono Cross released in Japan, and how long was its development cycle? Is it possible Square would have contracted with a company like this to provide...whatever it is this company provides? Rad Game Tools isn't in Chrono Cross' list of credits in the instruction booklet. Probably a false lead.

EDIT: Aha! BIK, BINK, what's the difference? Rad Game Tools is power and I've got the -- oh, nevermind. Anyway, Rad Game Tools does use BIK files. Could Square have contracted with this company? I've got a BIK compressor from Rad Game Tools, but I don't know if I'll be able to find a decompressor. Stay tuned.

[FaustWolf]

I'm not sure which is worse - posting the longest thread ever, or double-posting. I'll just double-post.

Still haven't found a decompressor folks, but guess what's in these .BIK archives? TEXTURES!! Whoo-hoo! Apparently PSicture can get at them. It's most likely that they are exactly the same ones Zeality and I have already, but I'm going to upload all the textures I can find in these .BIKs.

[FaustWolf]

Triple post! Sorry, but I'm excited over all this.

Here's the textures PSicture ripped from all three .BIK archives I was blessed with last night. This is Disc 1 stuff only, btw.
http://rapidshare.com/files/62259892/BIKTextures.rar.html

I'd like to point out that the .BMPs ripped by PSicture only account for 130MB out of the 420 MB contained in the .BIKs, and the presence of the textures within the .BIKs strongly suggests that what's inside is useful.

What else could be in these .BIK archives? Music? Movies? Character model pieces? I'll throw a .BIK at the xentax forums and see if anybody there bites, but that will take months, years, or forever since those intrepid programmers do their decompressing magic for free and are inundated with hundreds of requests like this.

Hopefully we can find a way to decompress these .BIKs ourselves before the End of Time. I'll finish uploading all three .BIK archives for intrepid explorers to examine. FORWARD, KNIGHTS OF THE SQUARE TABLE! RIP THESE BIKS TO SHREDS!! 

[justin3009]

I'm gonna go ahead and say that this is probably the most active compendium has been in months.  This is just amazing stuff to work with.

[FaustWolf]

All three .BIKs (I'll refer to them as my "blessings" from now on, I think) are available on Rapidshare for interested parties now. See first post.

Yeah justin, 'tis certainly an era of exploration for both Trigger and Cross. What's so monumental about the .BIKs is that I believe these may be the archives Square compressed Chrono Cross' data into, sort of like the .lzs archives you see when you pop Final Fantasy VII into your CD tray. *IF* Filestripper ripped these archives straight from the iso without any junk getting into it, *THEN* we should be able to get an idea of the Chrono Cross CD's file structure. For example, we might be able to toss one of the .BIKs in a hex editor and see what its file header looks like, then locate that file header in the iso. Then we can say, ".BIK 1 starts at address xxxx and ends at address zzzz, .BIK 2 starts at address yyyy, and all the data in between zzzz and yyyy belong to files or archives we aren't familiar with yet."

From what I've seen you've way more experience than I have in the hexadecimal scene, justin. Can you tell me if I'm thinking straight?

EDIT: I'm linking to the pertinent thread on the xentax boards. Hopefully any feedback I get there will lead to synergy and fellow Compendiumites will have ideas for how to proceed. Posting on the boards requires a forum membership (which might not be free - I don't rightly remember). If anyone can't see the xentax posts from the link below, tell me and I'll recap everything that occurs there.

http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?t=2815

If you have any comments or ideas regarding what's posted over at xentax, please discuss in this thread, I guess.

[ZeaLitY]

Craaap, I won't be free to look at this until late tonight. Anyway, yes...this is revolutionary!

[FaustWolf]

Let's hope this all leads somewhere. I've just discovered that the .BMPs we've been capturing as textures over the past few days are, in fact, .TIM files thanks to Darkfox at the xentax forums. Bah, I should have known that already -- PSicture just outputs to .BMPs after capturing .TIMs and other files.

So I guess my question now is, does anybody know of a .TIM ripper that will actually output .TIM images? It would prove useful because that way we could examine the hex signature of the .TIM files and compare it to the hex code inside the .BIK containers as well as inside the iso itself.

[ZeaLitY]

TIMViewer does it. I had to use TIMViewer instead of PSicture on the demo because PSicture, for some reason, refused to read any of the textures past a certain point. Thankfully, TIMViewer didn't have such a problem, but it meant I had to rip to .TIM first and then batch convert to BMP.

[FaustWolf]

*Woot-woot!* Now I've got 9619 TIM files from Disc 1 - that's 9619 giant hex strings that can be used as "mile-markers" for the Chrono Cross internal file structure map if my theories are correct. Since you've ended up with only 5000 or so unique images I think, it will be interesting to see the dynamics involved with duplicates (if we could get our hands on a PSX emulator that provides live feedback regarding its various internal processes). I mean, if Serge's texture is duplicated in sector range "x" and sector range "y", does the game instruct the emulator to look only at "x" at all times? But that's just a passing interest, I guess, compared to finding out where the model and pre-rendered background data is.

I figure we can map Disc 1 first, work out all the kinks in that process, then apply it to Disc 2.

[FaustWolf]

BREAKING NEWS

Booya~! I can now say with approximately 90% certainty that Serge's (first) TIM texture is located between offsets

002B6340 ~ 002BA55F (these values were acquired before I enforced "quality control" on myself and are no longer valid).

in the first .BIK posted at Rapidshare above.

I have proof! Pics are big for clarity, so click on the image URLs to see what I'm seeing.

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/8215/hexproof288beginningvc4.jpg
The lower panel shows the beginning few bytes in TIM 288, Serge's first .TIM texture if you rip from the full iso with TIMviewer as per Zeality's suggestion. The upper panel shows the same bytes starting at address 002B6340 in the first .BIK file. They're identical, though the .TIM hexadecimal seems to be shifted by one, er, "slot" (2 characters). It's easier to see the identical-ness if you refer to the ascii strings to the right of the indicated hexadecimal blocks.

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/8028/hexproof288enduw8.jpg
Jumping ahead by 00004210 hexadecimal bytes(?) - the file size of .TIM 288 expressed in hex - we apparently come to the end of the file in the .BIK.

The reason I say I'm only 90% certain that this is Serge's texture .TIM 288 is that it may be the case that I'm only showing the generic header and footer of a .TIM file - maybe any character's texture would have the same beginning and ending, and I could be looking at Norris in hex for all I know. But still, this is turning out to be *very* promising.

It also has an important ramification - the .TIM data in the .BIKs are not compressed; if the .TIMs were compressed, their data would be scrambled by the compression routine I imagine. I hesitate to say that none of the data in the .BIKs are compressed; is it possible that some data in a container or archive could be compressed while other data is not?

I don't know where Serge's .TIM 288 is in the full iso yet, because my puny early version of Hex Workshop is neither man nor woman enough to handle a 600MB file with a Microsoft Word document open at the same time. I'll try again once I'm done studying for the evening and report.

Now a whole other can of worms is opening up. How should we keep track of where the various .TIM files are in the iso and .BIKs? My proposition is to create a separate notepad / text file for each separate .TIM with the appropriate info, as per the following: http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/7131/tim288recordoo5.jpg

But I'm not sure how feasible that would be. I mean, that's potentially 9000 text files being hosted at the Compendium if we track all TIM file locations including duplicates, and the one for .TIM 288 is 70KB as it is.

What do we think, crew?
Oh, and I'm not all that well-schooled in ROMspeak, so I'm probably off in my terminology above. Feel free to correct me anybody, if the need arises during this discourse.

[Luminaire85]

A few thoughts, in bulleted form:

• Looking at the *.tim file format, it looks like only the first few bytes are identical between files, if that. Ironically it might be easier to identify TIM structures if more bytes were the same at the start because we could code an algorithm to do it. But I agree that it looks like you have found the right offsets for those files.

• You might try the free version of Cygnus Hex Editor. I doubt it's the best one out there, but Wikipedia says it can handle up to 2 GB files. I had no problem opening the *.bik files in it.

• I also tried two of the *.bik files in RAD Video Tools 1.8w, and both failed with an error message saying "This Bink file uses an old or beta Bink file format - please re-Bink the original video file." This page states that way back before March 1999 they changed the Bink format. Seeing as how Chrono Cross came out in 1999, it wouldn't be surprising if they were still using the old Bink beta format. 

• This page states that Square Enix licensed Bink for, among other things, FF8 for Windows. Interesting.

• It's strange that they appear to have obfuscated their game data using an audio/video codec.

[FaustWolf]

Holy cow, Luminaire, thanks for confirming the BINK/Square relationship!! Amazing info, and Zeality can even include that little tidbit in the site's next update perhaps. Fascinating industry detail there. I wonder if there's an old BINK decompressor floating on the Net somewhere...If we could track down Rad Video Tools ver. 0.8, we could just be done with this whole matter in a matter of days, probably. Tantalizing!

I'll check out Cygnus too. My old copy of Hex Workshop lasts 89 more days, so I'll be good through Christmas break and a little beyond.

And -- writing algorithms!?

Spekkio: We've hauled in a Marlin here, kids! /Spekkio

Thanks for walking in here, Luminaire!

[ZeaLitY]

425.893.4300

We can just call them, tell them we have a really, really old BIK file we dug up on an old hard drive and no longer have the source video, and are wondering whether 0.8 is available anywhere so we can decompress it.

[ZeaLitY]

I found 0.8i and tried playing; got the same message.

But I can't find a general decompression option, just something to convert to AVI or other media formats. So of course it won't play a file archive.

Is there something outside "video tools" using BIK?

Googling brings up no downloads earlier than 0.8i.

[FaustWolf]

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to send the Rad folks an email asking them if they can lend out a beta version of whatever program could decompress .BIK files. Though I'm a little worried about them asking exactly what it is we're up to. C&D time! Though Square must know what the Qhimm community's been up to with Final Fantasy VII all this time, and they haven't had any problems yet.

@Luminaire: CYGNUS ROCKS! Once I figured out how to effectively use its search feature, hexadecimal exploration has been going much more smoothly than it had with Hex Workshop. Thanx for the suggestion!