Well, yes I'm technically new to this, but definitely far from being new to technology.  All i'm trying to do ATM is rip a ps1 game's text through a table into a text dump.  So, I've read the documentation, but they fall slightly short as to where "most" text pointers are actually found.  And the weird thing is that after extracting the files from the game itself, I've found a script.r2 file.

Anyone know of anything that can read that and possibly provide me with the pointers that I can use?  Or do I have to hex it?

Thanks in advance

good luck clay,lots of people are waiting for this project

Console games almost never use standardized stuff, they practically always use their own custom code. That's why you won't find any tools for this kind of thing. The compression of Suikogaiden is some LZ variant (most games use something this), but the exact details of the implementation are still unknown to me too. You can propably tell already, but I've also started working on the game, although I didn't get that far yet and haven't touched it lately.

I'm not 100% sure the games uses an encryption, but the signs clearly point that way. You unpacked the archieve files, right? Did you figure out what those last 4 bytes from each file descriptor in the header are? I assume it's a decryption key for each file. It can't be some pointer since it's far outside the usual PSX memory range and many files share the same 4 byte code. The only thing left that it could be -AFAIK- is an encryption key.

While I was debugging the game I also came across the routine that I believe does the decryption. It just swaps bytes out from a memory buffer. It changes a lot of the data, but it doesn't change the size by even one byte. So I'm pretty sure it's the decryption. I assume that the suspected encryption keys from the header determine how that buffer in memory is initialized.

That was as far as I got on my first day with the game, I decided to focus on other, easier projects first then. Feel free to try your hand it further, I'm very interested to hear from you when you get results. Don't take my observation's as absolute truth either, it's really just my current guess work. If you find out more, please let me know

There is only one way to crack this game - go into the ASM code and debug how it works. I don't think you'll figure this one out by looking at the data alone. Picking up ASM shouldn't be too hard with your programming background and we're always happy to help with specific questions if you decide to stick with the project.

Good luck  :thumbsup:

Waughhh... this all sounds so complex. But! Go go Clay! I know you can extract that script~! Heheh... and then comes the translating and the patching. XD This really is a huge project, but I think we can do it.

 Right. I won't blather on any longer, but best of luck! <3