Endings

[Raww Le Klueze]

Btw, I'm having problems to find the data for S4 and 5. Concerning S4, I have to figure out the table. S5 file system on the other hand gives me headaches. May take a while, though. Any help is appreciated

I don't think the problem you have with IV is the table, but rather that the scripts are packed into one or more of the bin files so you can't access them directly. It doesn't have any file structure like I - III so it seems they hid the scripts somewhere. Probably the FILEDATA.BIN one.

A relative search for any common unique words like Punishment or Warlock turn up empty in all files.

They did the same in Suikoden I + II for the PSP so.

[Celes]

Yeah I checked all the FILEDATA as well. I guess they used a different chartable like S1 and 2 (while 3 had the standard ASCII).

[Raww Le Klueze]

I was able to gleen some information in sort of ASCII from the PAL disc, but I can't do the same on the NTSC. Most of the files are just too big for my computer to manage allocating enough memory to open them.

In the FILEDATA.BI1 there's the following:

O.N.C.E...Y.O.U...S.T.A.R.T...F.I.S.H.I.N.G...Y.O.U...W.A.I.T...F.O.R...A...B.I.T.E.
7.H.E.N...Y.O.U...G.E.T...A...B.I.T.E...T.H.E.R.E...L.L...B.E..A...M.A.R.K..O.N...T.H.E...P.I.C.T.U.R.E
O.F...T.H.E...F.I.S.H.I.N.G...P.O.L.E.

There's a lot like that in there, and it repeats in all the languages for the PAL version, german, french... I have absolutely no idea why it's all in caps or why there's a hexvalue of 8A after each letter.

They appear to be instructions for various things but they look strange.

[Celes]

I do not possess the PAL version. However, the NTSC has only FILEDATA.BIN, FILEDATA.BI1 and FILEDATA.BI2 where gameplay data could be stored. I've scanned all files for the stats of the Giant Tree without any luck. It has to be encrypted in some way, and afaik no one has hacked this game so far...

S 1-3 had all a reasonably well-arranged file structure, while this game has none at all. And S3 is the only game where the text is stored in plain ASCII. You need tables to read the text of 1 & 2.

I'm open for suggestions...

[Raww Le Klueze]

Most likely they are packed in that BIN file. Extracting them wouldn't be an easy task either, and I'm willing to bet that V does it the same way.

Looking in the SLUS file you can see some of filepaths that aren't available straight on the disc.

Generally it looks like "works/conv/event/misc/chara_text.msb"

If it calls it from the CD it says "cdrom0:/MOVIE/OPEN.PSS"

I did manage to make some relative searches that turned up Snowe and some other names, but all adjacent text were complete gibberish so it was just a fluke that numbers matched.

If you base it off the PAL disc that turned up that ASCII, is it possible they put another value next to each letter that the game skips over when it displays it? Suikoden III does that sometimes. Cause that would really scew up any relative search. Though I can't imagine why the hell they'd do that.

As for III, as far as I've seen only the SLUS is ASCII, I needed a table for all the BIN files to be readable. Though I did switch hexreader once and it read them all straight away...

[Pyriel]

Suikoden IV and V have "scrambled" files. At least, the usual code overlays are scrambled. I don't remember exactly how to unscramble them algorithmically. The method they used wasn't particularly straight-forward, and the time required to reassemble the data into a usable form probably contributed a bit to the ridiculous load times. As I recall, the "scrambling" just shifts one byte out of something like every 8-16 bytes to another location in the file (maybe a swap).

Again, I can't swear that they did this same nonsense with non-executable data.

If there are "hidden" files that are accessed by raw sector-addressing, the easy way to confirm would be to rip the disc to an ISO and then GREP the ISO file for a few strings you're looking for. It'd take a little while, but at least you wouldn't waste time trying to figure out how Konami hid the files before you've confirmed that they did. I'd start with an ASCII scan, and then try Unicode. If both of those turn up nothing, a last resort would be a binary string search using the character encodings from the Japanese 932 code page, as some developers have used that in lieu of localizing the text to something more common in the US.

Edit: After rereading your posts, I'd guess Konami created their own bastardized character encoding again. As far as I know, the 8A range is for CJK ideographs in every common, 16-bit or multi-byte encoding. I'd say it was just your hex editor interpreting random data as ASCII, but that's too long a string of coherent 0x8A<ASCII value> sets to be a coincidence. If it was 0x82, it would be the 932 code page.