NDS Model Ripping Tutorial

[DrMcCoy]

- 2DA File (.2da)

2-dimensional array. Basical a table of data. In Sonic Chronicles, they are used to map palettes to the various tiles that make up the background image.

- CBGT File (.cbgt)

These store the area background images, in a compressed and tile-based manner.

The xoreos-tools have a tool, cbgt2tga, that can take a CBGT file, and the respective 2DA and PAL file, and create a common TGA image with the game background.

A collection of xoreos-tools binaries for various operating systems can be found on the releases page.

- CDPTH File (.cdpth)

These store per-pixel, 16-bit depth values for the background images. This is used in the game to figure out when a piece of the background image is in front of a 3D character, and when behind.

The xoreos-tools have cdpth2tga tool that takes a CBGT and its 2DA, and create a common, grayscale TGA image of the depth map. The resolution is decreased to 8-bit for that, though.

- Palette File (.pal)

Each PAL file contains a collection of palettes, to be used by the CBGT background images.

- VX File (.vx)

Videos, using the Actimagine Video Codec. As far as I am aware, there is nothing out these, besides probably the original tools from Actimagine (not publically available), that can even play them.

If someone with video codec reverse engineering experience and skills could RE that for, say, ffmpeg, that would be very much appreciated.

- TLK File (.tlk)

TalkTable, a collection of all user-visible text, accessible through a numerical index. In Sonic Chronicles, TLKs are GFF V4.0 files.

The xoreos-tools have a tlk2xml tool that can convert those into a human-readable XML file. (Note: While xml2tlk can theoretically do it the other way round, i.e. recreate a TLK file out of such an XML file, it can't create the TLK variant that's used by Sonic. At the moment, it can only create TLK files that can be read by earlier BioWare games.)

- HERF File (.herf)

A Hashed ERF, an archive file (like, say, ZIP) containing other resource files. Doesn't contain file names, but only hashes of those names, but there might be a dictionary file which does have names. The xoreos-tools have an unherf tool that can extract those HERF archives, read the dictionary, and also contains a dictionary of hashes->filenames I figured out already. Failing that, a file will be extracted with the hash (in hex notation) as the file name.

- BIN File (.bin)

Probably the game executables?

- SADL File (.sadl)
- SDAT File (.sdat)

Music data and sound bank.

- SaveTest1.sav

Probably a save state test file left behind from development.

As for the models, those are normal Nitro files, NSBMD with NSBTX textures. They are within the HERF archives.