Always loved all of the pretty bacground images for PopCap Games' Bejeweled Deluxe, and luckily all of the images are stored locally in the installed directory of the game ("Bejeweled 2 Deluxe\Images\Backdrops"; filenames "Backdrop00.jpg" through "Backdrop16.jpg")... makes for some nice WinDoZe wallpaper 😀
Bejeweled Twist and Peggle Deluxe (as well as *all* newer "post" BJ2 PopCap games) are a whole different animal altogether though. Unfortunately the resources are stored in the encrypted file "Main.pak" (located in the games' installed directory on your hard drive). BJT has some especially *NICE* pics... perfect for more WinDoZe wallpaper.
Extraction was impossible... until now... just stumbled on this one:
Run "QuickBMS.exe", choose the "7x7m.bms" file, and then select the "Main.pak" file from the PopCap game of your choice... WHAMMO! Pretty pics in JP2 (JPEG 2000) format! 😀
Apparently until recently, it was fairly trivial to hack the PAK files for Plants vs Zombies and restore the original "Thriller Zombie" that was removed when the Michael Jackson estate got uppity.
Apparently until recently, it was fairly trivial to hack the PAK files for Plants vs Zombies and restore the original "Thriller Zombie" that was removed when the Michael Jackson estate got uppity.
I'm not sure about PVZ (although I've read about using the extractor with that game elsewhere on the Internet), but the PAKs from BJT and PD are XOR encrypted from what I've read.
I had previously tried various other XOR ecryption/deecryption utilities (supossedly using hex "F7"), but never had any luck... the resulting file was just as jumbled up as the original encrypted file <grin>.
Nevertheless, the QuickBMS utility (with the script file) does the job nicely... even recreating all of the directories and subdirectories with all of the resources extracted into them. Does such a good job, that you can even re-"PopPack.exe" the files back into a usable "Main.pak" 😀
BTW, has anyone played the new Bejeweled 3? Just bought that one the other day... the music is AWESOME!
QuickBMS can also extract all of the resources from BJ3's "Main.pak" game resources file, the music as well (in ".MO3"... can be played/wave-converted using XMPlay). Skaven has really outdone himself with the contributions to the soundtrack... being his usual style of orchestral (rather obscure for Tracker format), it's rather easy to pick out which tunes he contributed to the project 😀
I like all of the music, but ESPECIALLY pretty is the music for the "Butterfly" game mode of BJ3 😀
I probably won't buy Bejeweled 3 unless I can get it for five bucks or less (which will happen someday), but now I have another reason to finally install Uplink.
I probably won't buy Bejeweled 3 unless I can get it for five bucks or less (which will happen someday)
If you're a Bejeweled fan, 'tis definately worth the $20 bucks 😀 Now, the original price of $20 was WAY too steep for the PC version of Bejeweled Blitz IMHO, but the same for BJ3 is worth it 😀
Jorpho wrote:
but now I have another reason to finally install Uplink.
Sorry, prolly a dumb question, but what is "Uplink"?
P.S. Fired off an email to him about the music telling him how much I enhoyed it. I also asked specifically which of the songs he contributed (the others are by Alexander Brandon), and here was his reply:
Peter Hajba wrote:Heya Richard, […] Show full quote
Heya Richard,
Thanks for writing, and nice to hear you've enjoyed the music in
Bejeweled 3! 😄
To be exact on who's made what, Alexander Brandon made:
- Poker Mode music and win/lose fanfares
- Buried Treasure / Diamond Mine Mode music and win/lose fanfares
- Classic Mode music track part 3
- Zen Mode music track parts 3 and 4
The rest were made by me. Including the Butterflies song. Glad ya like
it. 😀
The soundtrack is going to be released for sale on BandCamp in the near
future, I hope, just like the Plants Versus Zombies soundtrack. PopCap
still needs to sort out some legal matters before it can happen.
BTW, I posted this over in the XMPlay forums as well, figured someone here might be able to shed some light on it as well 😀
I was wondering if anyone knew the correlation of PopCap Games' "Music.xml" "Offset" entries for their various games' music, and the sub-songs info that is displayed within XMPlay's "General" info window?
An example, the files "Bejeweled3_suite.mo3" and "music.xml", extracted from Bejeweled 3's "Main.pak" game resource file:
XMPlay displays this info in the "General" info window for the "Bejeweled3_suite.mo3" music file:
Anyone have any idea how to correlate the "Offset" entries in the above file with the number of the sub-song as displayed within XMPlay?
P.S. Most all newer PopCap games (based on their PopCap Framework engine) utilitze this same thing... various sub-songs contained in their main Tracker format music file (either MO3 or IT format), using a "Music.xml" file to tell the game what music to play and when (as well as volumes, tempo, and such).
I would have never guessed that PopCap's games used tracker music; I imagined they just used some streaming music format. Are trackers frequently used in other recent, non-PopCap games as well?
rfnagel wrote:
Sorry, prolly a dumb question, but what is "Uplink"?
Another game that lists Mr. Hajba in its credits, according to the Wikipedia article. It came out quite a few years ago and is available on Steam.
I would have never guessed that PopCap's games used tracker music; I imagined they just used some streaming music format. Are trackers frequently used in other recent, non-PopCap games as well?
Although PopCap Games are still using Tracker format for the music in their new(er) games, other games generally do not. The last non-PopCap game that I could think of would be Epic's Unreal series.
Jorpho wrote:
Another game that lists Mr. Hajba in its credits, according to the Wikipedia article. It came out quite a few years ago and is available on Steam.
Thanks for the info... I'll have to look into that one 😀 Heh, when you first said "Uplink", I was thinking of some sort of communications utility program 🤣.
Jorpho wrote:
Too bad his web page seems to be three years out of date.
Yeah, he hasn't updated it in quite sometime. But, that's were I got his email address from... glad he's still checking his email 😀
JPEG2000 is also used in digital cinema, a.k.a. digital film. It is unique from regular JPEG as the compression artifacts are less visible in JPEG2000 than in the old JPEG 1992 standard. The monochrome GIF images that you see are alpha channels that take charge of the transparency of the images.
The massively popular 2009 PopCap game, Plants vs. Zombies, also uses a PAK file, but does not use JPEG 2000 imaging, and rarely uses any GIF imaging. The bulk of the graphics are from extra-high quality lossless (as compared to lossy techniques of JPEG and JPEG2000) PNG images that have their own alpha channel embedded in the image. If any JPEG images are used, they are traced by monochrome PNG images used by the game as alpha channels.
rfnagel wrote:BTW, I posted this over in the XMPlay forums as well, figured someone here might be able to shed some light on it as well :) […] Show full quote
BTW, I posted this over in the XMPlay forums as well, figured someone here might be able to shed some light on it as well 😀
I was wondering if anyone knew the correlation of PopCap Games' "Music.xml" "Offset" entries for their various games' music, and the sub-songs info that is displayed within XMPlay's "General" info window?
An example, the files "Bejeweled3_suite.mo3" and "music.xml", extracted from Bejeweled 3's "Main.pak" game resource file:
XMPlay displays this info in the "General" info window for the "Bejeweled3_suite.mo3" music file:
Anyone have any idea how to correlate the "Offset" entries in the above file with the number of the sub-song as displayed within XMPlay?
P.S. Most all newer PopCap games (based on their PopCap Framework engine) utilitze this same thing... various sub-songs contained in their main Tracker format music file (either MO3 or IT format), using a "Music.xml" file to tell the game what music to play and when (as well as volumes, tempo, and such).
There actually is no relation with them. The numbers in the music.xml denote the tracker order where to start the music. You can use OpenMPT to examine the MO3 files for that.
The offline PC downloadable version of Bejeweled Blitz uses the IT format which contains the instrument samples in uncompressed format (as compared to the MP3/OGG of MO3). This file is not inside the main.pak, but on a folder, named music, on the game's installation directory.
Bejeweled Twist uses two MO3 files, one named bejewel twist 06.10.mo3, from Philippe Charon, the other one is BejeweledTwist24.mo3, from Peter Hajba (a.k.a. Skaven), using the original samples from Bejeweled 2. These two files are however not inside the main.pak, but on a folder, named music, on the game's installation directory.
Not all PopCap games use a music.xml file, some exceptions are the original Bejeweled Deluxe (the Bejeweled Deluxe you mean is Bejeweled 2 Deluxe) or Bejeweled 1, Peggle, Insaniquarium!, and Plants vs. Zombies.