I found this forum after I stumbled over "The Definitive Guide To Exploring File Formats". A great document! Just recently, I found a Master of Magic Emulator and I just couldn't figure out how that guy had come up with information about the archives. Reading the document, I played along with the Quake 2 pak0.pak file and was able to extract an image from it with HexWorkshop! Awesome! :)
I then tried (with both GameExtractor and MultiEx-Commander) to extract files from a .cat file from Magic:The Gathering. That went well, but now I do not know what to do with the extracted files. Since M:TG can be downloaded from The Underdogs, I think it's safe to post a link to an extracted file and also another one .
What I learned so far (not much, but I'm still a total newbie in this business, as I read the document just yesterday):
- In the .cat file, the file sizes range from 8k to 59k. I suppose all files are card art and should have the same image size; then they needed to be compressed, right?
- All files start with 0001 0000 9C00 0000 where 9C00 seems to be the pointer to the end of the 'header'
- After this, there comes a file name, variable length, always ending with .tif (I found no sign of a TIFF header anywhere inside)
- Then, there are some bytes which are the same in all files:
0000 0000 4602 0000 D301 0000 2001 0000 E800 0000 0900 0000 0100 0000 0000 0000
- From then on, I am kind of lost. There is always the value 0080 before some kind of - for me tabular - data starts, see the following screenshot:
I could look for more bits and pieces, but I don't think I'll come to any conclusion. If anybody here has experience with these files or can give me a hint on what to do with them, I would really be grateful.
Thanks a lot!
Roland