Lord of the Rings - The Third Age

Extraction and unpacking of game archives and compression, encryption, obfuscation, decoding of unknown files
IRFreeze
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 23, 2021 11:08 pm

Lord of the Rings - The Third Age

Post by IRFreeze »

Hello,
I'm looking to see if anybody can get access to the files in the game Lord of the Rings - The Third Age.

The files all seem to be .sas and .scg.

I've uploaded the game folder from the first disc of the gamecube version. This is one of the few gamecube games that has 2 discs, but the second disc has the same file formats so anything found for this disc will probably work for the other as well.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/nqqg0jkf ... e.rar/file

The files in e01c and e02c are split up by chapter, one sas and one scg for each chapter of the game. Not entirely sure what the e98c is for, potentially for the Evil Mode of the game.
The globscene files are probably, as the name suggests, things that have to be loaded no matter what chapter is loaded. Since they are the same two formats I would assume they are compressed the same way, but I haven't been able to figure very much out on my own and do not have experience with this kind of thing.

I've also uploaded just the chapter 1 sas and scg file and just the globscene files in case someone doesn't want to download all the files.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/nlb9n1q1 ... 1.rar/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/uv56spnc ... n.rar/file

Thanks in advance for any assistance
IRFreeze
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 23, 2021 11:08 pm

Re: Lord of the Rings - The Third Age

Post by IRFreeze »

I did a bit more digging and found an old post on vg-resource where they were able to extract some of the .SCG files for this game.
https://www.vg-resource.com/thread-31236.html

They were working on the PS2 version, so instead of .SCG it was .SCP file extension but when I used their script for BMS it still worked. Only major difference seems to be that they got RVWS files while when I extracted the GameCube version I got SWVR files.

Not sure if it is common for GCN and PS2 to have things reversed like the above file formats, but there is also a thread on NeoSeeker where they were using Cheat Engine to change items at run time in memory and the item codes are also reversed, Ex: Bsh1 in PS2 and 1hsB in GCN.
https://www.neoseeker.com/forums/20375/ ... s-in-game/

Here are the extracted SWRV files from one of the SCG files.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/eamlghll ... R.rar/file

The script they used still didn't work on the globscene.SCG, nor did they post anything about the .SAS files.