I wrote a tool that extracts all the embedded files from any Starcraft 64 ROM (in .z64 format). Files are compressed with a LZSS variant which took a couple of days to figure out. I was not able to figure out how the name hashes worked (I didn't try very hard though).

Release: https://github.com/heinermann/BOLTextract/releases/tag/v0.1
Source: https://github.com/heinermann/BOLTextract

Starcraft 64 mission briefings are not stored in the CHK, instead they are a separate text file that work similar to the credits or intermission screens. It also uses those same files instead of cinematics.

Example mission briefing:


Example "cinematic":


All CHKs are openable in SCMDraft. There are a few 2-player UMS maps in addition to the extra campaign scenarios. I haven't taken a look at iscript/aiscript.bin since I'm not very interested in it but all the files are there. There are also "encyclopedia" files which have additional unit descriptions, it is in a custom binary format. Image format seems custom but have a similar header to old TGA images, their palettes are in separate files that pair with them. Not sure what the sound format is (or which files they are in), there is no obvious header for them. There are some other familiar formats like TBL used.


EDIT: Hah just found this old topic.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 8 2021, 8:24 am by Heinermann.

lmao

I need to memorize this for... maybe a story down the road.

Files are big-endian (e.g. 0x12345678 is stored as 12 34 56 78)

Palette files are of the format:

where the color format is 5551 RGBA (described here: https://n64squid.com/homebrew/n64-sdk/textures/image-formats/#16-bit)

Image files are of the format:



I also found some bin dialog files, but they don't seem overly important to figure out ... idk how much I'll dig, the image data just happened to be uncompressed data and super easy to read.


EDIT:

Found sound files.

I don't actually know how to decode ADPCM, I just imported raw in Audacity and selected that as the encoding. (googling N64 audio encoding is what led me to try it)


EDIT2:

Found the scripts.
14516e0\6eaf82e9.unk = scripts\bwscript.bin
14516e0\8daf821a.unk = scripts\aiscript.bin
14516e0\17aea4f9.unk = scripts\iscript.bin
at first glance it looks like they are just direct copies of the regular ones (meaning little-endian, too)


EDIT3:

A bunch of these are literally just grp files lmao
11e388e\, 12cec2c\, 1417d9a\, 1003674\, 1337846\ along with some random ones throughout the other graphics files

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Mar 9 2021, 4:08 am by FaRTy1billion.

Oh just FYI the folder hex strings are just the memory locations in the binary and not actual hashes. The "directories" in the layout don't actually have hashes, only the files do.

I assume that they are always the same though, right?

No they can be different between different roms (NTSC, PAL, Beta, etc).

I found the names of some WAVs in my N64 executable. Here they are (with addresses):

---

I came to the same conclusion. There are a bunch of images with size 61456 bytes. I can't get the right palette, but those are from the slideshows that replace cinematics.

---

There's an interesting directory that looks like this in my ROM dump:


It has 6 larger files and a bunch of smaller ones. I bet these are the main menu cinematics. They appear to have the following format:


This could be interesting, because Starcraft 64 uses a slightly different menu animation for the original Terran campaign.

Searches involving "Mass Media" who developed the N64 port might help with figuring out which tools and file formats they used. Blizzard was supposedly owned by "Davidson & Associates Inc" at the time.

Some of Mass Media's other games can be listed here and here on their wiki.

After checking some of their other titles, I found some other games that use the embedded BOLT archive and my program appears to work on all of them the N64 ones (likely just an endian issue).

• Namco Museum 64 (N64)
  
• Bassmasters 2000 (N64)
  
• Ms. Pac-Man - Maze Madness (N64)
  
• Power Rangers - Lightspeed Rescue (N64)
  
• Shrek Super Party (XBox)
  
• Pac-Man Collection (GBA)
  
• The Lost Vikings (GBA)
  
• Rock n' Roll Racing (GBA)
  
• Blackthorne (GBA)
  
• Namco Museum (GBA)
  
• Ms. Pac-Man - Maze Madness (Dreamcast, Track 19)
  
• Namco Museum (Dreamcast, Track 5)
  
• The Game of Life (Windows 95!)
  

Power Rangers also has what appears to be the same format for cinematics with a "magic" of 0x00102b11. Namco Museum appears to have the same palette and image formats.

EDIT: Anyone looking to improve the BOLT extractor should probably look at Namco Museum because it rips into the BOLT archive immediately in the entry point, is the smallest ROM, and its compile is cleaner than Starcraft. Use one of the xbox/PC titles if you want to decompile BOLT stuff.

EDIT2: Games that use a filesystem (like XBox) use *.BLT files which are BOLT archives in roughly the same format (probably just need a little-endian version). (done)

EDIT3: Some games have some debug strings indicating function names:



EDIT4: I've updated BOLTExtract to support little endian archives by default (haven't updated the README to be generic).

The Game of Life also has the same "magic" header for its videos so this appears to be a common format for this company at least.

Post has been edited 12 time(s), last time on Apr 6 2021, 9:31 am by Heinermann.

That's an absolutely amazing find! I already dug into "The Game of Life" (life.exe; 1.0.0.0; SHA256: 3d2acde2ad02ffeb08d8071792288c2067cd8040fe37dd3b39a85b00c53144ad). I believe I found the function that loads BOLT files at address 0x42598C and the one that closes them at address 0x425BD0.

I assume that the function that gives you a handle to a specific file within BOLT is at 0x42676C. It appears to accept a handle to a BOLT file and an uint16. The latter are most often small consecutive numbers. And I hope I'm wrong, because there's no way these are hashes. But if I'm right, then the file names cannot be recovered in the general case.

I tried dumping the main menu textures from Starcraft 64 via an emulator. And it kinda worked.

What I found in the dump was a ton of images with sizes below 2K pixels. I initially thought that this corresponded to the internal representation of the animation format. Then I realized these blocks exist for unkimg files too. And those are definitely not encoded in blocks. So it must be some technical detail. The Nintendo does have a 4KiB texture cache, but that would imply a color depth of 16 bits for these 2 kilopixel blocks. And that can't be true, since the bolt file includes a bunch of palettes which imply 8 bit.

Anyhow - the blocks that belong to a single larger texture share the same width. Which makes it easier to group them together. Unless two textures share the same width (which is the case for all overlays of the currently active campaign). After grouping them I end up with this mess.

Stitching them together is a bit tricky. The timestamps are useful here, since the emulator dumps them in certain order. So groups of neighboring blocks have consecutive timestamps. This is not always reliable, though. I'm seeing quite a few inversions. If someone else attempts to stich them back up - I believe/hope the timestamp resolution of ZIP file is enough to preserve the original order.

I decided to give the marine animation for Episode 1 a try. As I mentioned earlier in the thread - it has some differences from the PC version - the stance, the angle, and him not holding a cigar. The latter is probably why we have this rendering in the first place. Nintendo are known for their censorship.

I'll be posting a more complete set of frames soon. But for now: