[TheShekinah]

I'm having some difficulty viewing the images and movies on the PSX disc for Sonic Wings Special. (I should also mention that it's a Japanese game, it does run so it's not a disc problem, and I'm totally new at this.) I've tried all the viewers I can find, but even though the two movies have the .STR extension, I get errors with all viewers. I was able to get one movie using jPSXdec, but it didn't find the second movie at all.

I'm more interested in getting images, but there aren't any graphics files at all in any of the formats I see mentioned with the viewers (.TIM and the like); instead, almost everything on the disc seems to be in .BIN files, with a .BIN file for each playable character in the game.

Is there any way to extract information from these .BIN files? Or am I going about this totally wrong? For all I know, I'm just making some really dumb mistake. Thanks!

 

[erictheturtle]

Looks like jPSXdec doesn't recognize most of the video sectors for that last movie, which means the game is doing something unique. No telling what it is without taking a close look at those sectors. I'll add this game to the list of those that need unique handling, but it's going to be awhile before jPSXdec will including handling for it (time isn't something I have much of these days).

For the images, that can really be hit or miss. If they're not normal TIM, you can hope they're saved somewhere as compressed TIM files (another format I expect jPSXdec will handle someday). But if the game used its own unique way of storing its images, you'll be stuck reverse-engineering the game to find them.

If you're willing to get your hands dirty, you could also check Qhimm forums. Those forums are packed with reverse-engineering efforts.

Also do you know why there is a 2nd version of the movies rotated 90 degrees?

 

[TheShekinah]

Thanks for the reply! I'm glad to know that it's not just me being stupid that keeps that second video from loading... and no hurry on the handling. I just wanted the video for my Sonic Wings wiki, and God knows when that thing will be anywhere near done. Incidentally, the game tends to crash at the end that first movie in the emulators I've used (ePSXe and pSX) unless I bypass the movie, so maybe there is something weird about the second one that's making them screw up.

The images may indeed be something altogether different. To me, it looks like they're saved in parts, because some backgrounds and characters are reused among the different endings, and the characters move around a bit on the background... so I'm imagining that there are a bunch of backgrounds someplace, then a bunch of character cutouts somewhere else.

EDIT: Ooh, found something. I used PSicture's Scan Directory command on some of the directories of BIN files and found images, although they're in pieces using really freaky palettes. I'll keep messing with it.

Oh, and about the second version of the movies... all I can figure is that it has something to do with the "arcade mode" option in the game. For some reason, that option rotates the stages 90 degrees to make it a horizontal shooter as opposed to a vertical one. I'm guessing that the rotated videos are for that mode, but I don't know why anyone would want to use it!

Thanks again for the help!