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Reverse engineering a game's (Cartooners) data files.

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First post, by Peter Swinkels

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EDIT:
See: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?759753 … d-import-actors

Hi,

Thinking it would be a nice challenge, I've been trying to reverse engineer Cartooner's actor files. Searching the internet for information about the game, the Apple IIgs, disassembly and analyzing a game's data I found some useful information. Through a lot of effort I've figured out about 75% of how these files work. Some parts of the files are proving rather difficult though.

Using Microsoft Visual Basic.net 2010 I made a viewer which displays all the known parts of an actor file. Link: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?759753 … d-import-actors.
The .zip file also contains a document in the "\Documents" folder describing everything I found out so far.

Is there any one here who knows about disassembly and/or has experience analyzing a game's data files?

Last edited by Peter Swinkels on 2015-02-08, 14:52. Edited 3 times in total.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 3 of 6, by Peter Swinkels

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Thanks for replying. I've just taken a quick look at those sites and they might contain information that can be help me along. I'll will also consider uploading the information I've so far there.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 4 of 6, by Peter Swinkels

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Okay, I've managed to create an account at http://www.shikadi.net but can't figure out where or how to create a page for the information I would like to add. The site's help page for editing is empty. Clicking "edit" on a page that appears to be suitable for what I want to add apparently allows me to edit the page's header and nothing else. 😕

After finally figuring out the answer to the site's automated account creation prevention question I managed to create an account at http://fileformats.archiveteam.org. I will see if I can accomplish more over there.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 5 of 6, by Calvero

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ModdingWiki:Contributing isn't empty.

In short: Go to the Halloween Harry page and click on Edit. Press Ctrl+A to select everything and Ctrl+C to copy everything. Then go to http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Cartooners and press Create. Now press Ctrl+V to paste the Halloween Harry text and start changing it to make it say Cartooners instead of Halloween Harry.

Reply 6 of 6, by Peter Swinkels

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I finally made a major breakthrough in figuring out Cartooners' Actor file format: the Cartooners Actor Viewer can now export the actual images rather than raw colorized data.

The improved program can be downloaded at http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?759753 … d-import-actors.

EDIT:
The program can now export an actor's data and images. This data can then be changed and imported again, meaning it is now possible to create custom actors.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

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