Beatmania IIDX series PS2

Extraction and unpacking of game archives and compression, encryption, obfuscation, decoding of unknown files
Velius
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2016 7:52 pm

Beatmania IIDX series PS2

Post by Velius »

Hello, I've been trying to extract the graphics for these games (there's 14 games, 15 if you count Premium Best). It's mainly a 2D sprite based music game with videos (MPEG). One of the reasons why the older games (pre 9th) don't have a lot of replayability is because the graphics UI sucks. Just take a look at that lane flare that's super bright and covers up the notes making it hard to read what's coming. 8th style is notoriously bad which is why I'm trying to tackle this first.

Image

The games after that got a heavy UI update that made the notes much more readable. Later games in the series for the arcade have the option to just turn off the lane flares. That's what I'm trying to do.

AFAIK, the file structure is similar to other games by Konami for the PS2 like Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill. There's only .BIN files in this case with no .DAT files. I tried looking for a TIM2 header in hex but I'm afraid I didn't have much luck. It seems they did a good job with archiving the files.

Funny enough, the games have had the music and chart data extracted so people can play the songs in a simulator program without the actual game but the guy who did it has no idea how to extract any of the 2d sprites.

I even looked at the textures through TexMod and I only got 128x128 textures that kept constantly changing depending on what notes were being hit and what was happening on the screen. Could this mean that assets related to the UI like your judgement or the lane flare are just drawn and not even stored as a texture to be extracted? Other textures extract fine and have other file sizes like 512x128 to store the game's menu text.

This game is split into 3 parts, BM2DX8A.bin (only 20 mb), BM2DX8B.bin and BM2DX8C.bin (1.7 gig and 2 gig respectively). What takes up most of the game's space is the .mpeg files and the music data. Hopefully this part contains all the graphics.

I'm a total scrub and any help where to go with this is appreciated.

https://mega.nz/#!6FZDWDoC!5EN4-S-57X_W ... sMBCm9KSYU