I need you help for Nancy Drew series .dat and .cif files

[stevenx]

I want to find out the subtitles in Nancy Drew series games.
Can you take a look at the .dat and .cif files?
Thanks.

[Vash]

It will be very interesting to see this game supported from the gobread! thanks anyway

[asmxtx]

Time will tell...

[Vash]

ok, I did my homeworks. I wrote an extractor for latest Nancy Drew's games (The Haunting Of Castle Malloy and Phantom Of Venice and maybe some earlier), but i have a tiny problem:

in The Haunting Of Castle Malloy the file with the dialogs is compiled in lua 5.1 but in the inside the format of the text is the SAME of Phantom Of Venice's that's not in LUA so there are two options:

-decompile the lua
-change some instruction in the exe taking those from phantom of venice

but i can't do anyone of that...could some one help out?

(first 0x30 bytes are just the header of each Nancy Drew's file, nothing to do with lua)

[aluigi]

the compression used in "Legend of the Crystal Skull" and probably other titles is the classical LZSS with the input bytes less a counter:

compression:
- compress with LZSS
- for(i = 0; i < out_size; i++) out += i;

decompression:
- for(i = 0; i < in_size; i++) in -= i;
- decompress with LZSS

[Vash]

i made the Translation Tollset for Phantom Of Venice and Castle Malloy, if anyone is interestedin translating it, he could contact me by PM and i'll pass you the text and image files with a little documentation. I won't pass the tools because they're not very user friendly and i'm not interested in doing that

[stevenx]

i made the Translation Tollset for Phantom Of Venice and Castle Malloy, if anyone is interestedin translating it, he could contact me by PM and i'll pass you the text and image files with a little documentation. I won't pass the tools because they're not very user friendly and i'm not interested in doing that

to Vash:
I want to know some detail about you tools.
Is this tools a single byte to single byte Translation Tollset ?
I want to Translation from english to chinese. Is it posibble?
It seems save the text in 2 bytes?
And you have cracked the compiled lua files?

to Beutest:
Want to konw more about lzss for this game.
You means :
1-->get the 30bytes file head
2-->use lzss to decompress the rest bytes?
Can you release a tool use this way as extractor for dancy series?

[Vash]

I think that a chinese translation coul be possible, but you'll need to hack the fonts i guess i have "cracked" the compiled lua files, yes..somehow i cracked just the one that contains the text, didn't decompiled it.

i can answer for bugtest too:

the lzss compression is applied to each file in the archive, but the filename table isn't the same of the newest game and the archives also contain a 0x800 byte very strange header (after the 0x30 byte header) that i can't understand, so maybe an extractor could be possible but a reinserter is not for the moment

[stevenx]

I think that a chinese translation coul be possible, but you'll need to hack the fonts i guess i have "cracked" the compiled lua files, yes..somehow i cracked just the one that contains the text, didn't decompiled it.

i can answer for bugtest too:

the lzss compression is applied to each file in the archive, but the filename table isn't the same of the newest game and the archives also contain a 0x800 byte very strange header (after the 0x30 byte header) that i can't understand, so maybe an extractor could be possible but a reinserter is not for the moment

I really need your help.
can you post a detail Format description?

Head1 Begin
?? 0x30Bytes '' filename table ?
Head1 End

Head2 Begin
?? 0x800Bytes '' filename table ?
Head2 End

For Each File
?? ??Bytes ''classical LZSS compressed data

Can you post or mail your tools and source to me?
I want to continue the research,thanks!

my mail: so750515@yahoo.co.jp

[asmxtx]

I have written an unpacker for "Nancy Drews". It is in BETA-Status and extracts "TREE"-files only.
I will release a complete version within the next days. Stay tuned.

[stevenx]

I have written an unpacker for "Nancy Drews". It is in BETA-Status and extracts "TREE"-files only.
I will release a complete version within the next days. Stay tuned.

Wow!Very thanks!

[Rheini]

the file with the dialogs is compiled in lua 5.1 [...] so there are two options:

-decompile the lua

Well, no decompiler, but at least recently a Lua 5.1 disassembler has come up: http://luaforge.net/projects/chunkspy/

EDIT: It's written in Lua, another disassembler available as an exe is located here: http://modtools.petrolution.net/tools/Lua

Your Autotext.cif file gives the following results, pretty nicely commented