Technical notes on the WiiU release.
The content directory of the game contains the music files (.OGG) and one resource bundle (.BIN)
content/
├── archive.bin
└── game
└── OGG
├── amb5001.ogg
...
└── amb5011.ogg
The file archive.bin contains the game data files.
The offset to the entries table and the number of entries are stored at the end of the file as 32 bits big endian integers (BE32).
Resource table entries format.
| Field | Type | Details |
|---|---|---|
| File name | \0 terminated string | File path |
| Uncompressed file size | BE32 | File size after decompression |
| File size | BE32 | File size in the resource bundle |
| Data offset | BE32 | File data offset in the resource bundle |
| Flags | BE32 | Either 0 or 1 |
Data is compressed with LZ4.
| File | Details |
|---|---|
| game/awt/data1728x1080/ | 1080p texture backgrounds |
| game/bmp/data1280x800/ | 800p texture backgrounds (with a corrupted or incomplete palette ? maybe left-over) |
| game/dat/*mac | bytecode |
| game/dat/*mat | polygons (shapes) |
| game/dat/*pal | RGB444 palette colors (Amiga) |
| game/txt/*txt | strings ('Good evening professor.') |
| game/wgz_mixed/*wav | sound files |
The 20th anniversary editions of Another World on consoles use higher resolution graphics than the Linux/Mac/Windows releases (1080p vs 800p).
The .awt (Another World Texture ?) files are the background pictures. The image pixels are stored as uncompressed RGBA (4 bytes). The file has a 12 bytes footer. Image dimensions are stored as 16 bits big endian integers (BE16).
08 08 08 08 : RGBA color component depth ?
BE16 : aligned width
BE16 : height
BE16 : width
BE16 : height
The game bytecode contains two variants, one for the original low-resolution (320x200) and another one for 'HD' (1280x800).
| Name | Part | Files |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 16001 | intro2011(hd).mac/.mat |
| Eau | 16002 | eau2011(hd).mac/.mat |
| Prison | 16003 | pri2011(hd).mac/.mat |
| Cite | 16004 | cite2011(hd).mac/.mat |
| Arene | 16005 | arene2011(hd).mac/.mat |
| Luxe | 16006 | luxe2011(hd).mac/.mat |
| Final | 16007 | final2011(hd).mac/.mat |
The only difference between the 'SD' and 'HD' bytecode files appear to be related to the polygons offsets, as expected.
$ diff -u intro2011.mac.asm intro2011hd.mac.asm
...
-033A: (FA) drawShape(code=0xFA, x=160, y=100); // offset=0xF5F0 (bank1.mat)
+033A: (FB) drawShape(code=0xFB, x=160, y=100); // offset=0xF608 (bank1.mat)
033E: (18) playSound(res=44, freq=15, vol=63, channel=2)
...
An example of polygons upscale (SD vs HD .mat shape) :
The game engine communicates with the game code via special variables.
| Index | Details |
|---|---|
| 0xBF | Game difficulty (0 to 2) |
| 0xDB | Enable sounds preloading (resource >= 2000) |
| 0xDE | Enable playback of remastered sounds (set to 0 when running the game in original low resolution) |
The .elf executable has a symbol table section.
$ rpl2elf AnotherWorld_WiiU.rpx
$ readelf -S AnotherWorld_WiiU.elf
...
[23] .symtab SYMTAB c0000000 301bf0 02ac90 10 A 24 24411 4
...
$ readelf -sW AnotherWorld_WiiU.elf | tr -s' ' | cut -d' ' -f9 | c++filt
...
CInterpret::LoadGamePart(int, int)
CInterpret::InterpretAll(void)
CInterpret::Interpret(unsigned short)
CInterpret::HandleControl(void)
...
CDisplay::LoadImage(char const *, unsigned char *, int *, int *)
CDisplay::LoadPal(char const *, unsigned int *)
CDisplay::SetWorkScreen(int)
CDisplay::ComputePalette(void)
CDisplay::SetScreen(int)
CDisplay::FillScreen(int, unsigned char)
CDisplay::CopyScreen(int, int)
CDisplay::LoadImage(int, unsigned char *, int *, int *)
CDisplay::DrawImage(int)
CDisplay::PrintAt(int, unsigned short, unsigned short, unsigned char)
CDisplay::DrawScaledPoint(int, int, unsigned char)
CDisplay::DrawShapeHD(unsigned char *, float, float, unsigned short, float, unsigned char)
CDisplay::DrawHead(int, int, bool)
CDisplay::DrawShape(unsigned char *, int, int, unsigned short, unsigned char)