Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Zeus & Emperor - PAK, DAT, 555, SG3, etc

[modquest]

I wasn't sure whether to create 4 separate threads for each game or just keep them all together as they seem to share some file formats.

Caesar 3 (1998)
Pharaoh (1999)
Zeus (2000)
Emperor (2002)

All games for PC Windows
2D graphics / city building sim genre
See Mobygames entries here

The main files that all 4 games share seem to be PAK & 555
Also SG3, M3D, EMP & ENG which may need to be extracted also.

555, SG2 & SG3 appear to be graphic/image files.

List of file formats for each game:
Caesar 3 - pak, emp, 555, sg2, eng, smk, map
Pharaoh - pak, emp, 555, sg3, m3d, map
Zeus - dat, pak, 555, sg3, m3d, eng, set, map
Emperor - pak, 555, sg3, m3d, eng, cfg, map

Download a sampling of files from each game HERE.

I see PAK files on the list of games here so maybe there will be some news for these games.

Some players have tried hex editing to change the PAK files which you can read about here.
There is also a utility for SG2 & SG3 extraction here and here.

And an Open Source Caesar 3 project here.

Thanks for your time!

[aluigi]

For the SMK files:
http://aluigi.org/papers/bms/xentax_cs/ ... on_ZRB.bms

For Emperor PAK, just a decompressor (same as offzip -a):
http://aluigi.org/papers/bms/others/emperor_pak.bms

For Pharaoh PAK:
http://aluigi.org/papers/bms/others/pharaoh_pak.bms

[modquest]

I tried the Emp and Phar and got a "File" for Emperor which seems to have no extension.

Pharaoh extracted into many DAT files which need to be further extracted.

Download both results here.

Does any script need to be made for Caesar 3 and Zeus?

[aluigi]

Regarding Caesar 3 and Zeus, I made the script compatible with the archive formats I recognized so probably those 2 games use different formats that required too much time for being scripted.

[modquest]

Hey Luigi and any other programmers,

Would it be possible to get bms scripts for the 555 and SG3 file formats?
These are custom image formats which I can't open with any graphics program.
Maybe it's possible to convert these files to another format?

Would this be easier or tougher than the Paks?
It seems other games use these extensions but for other files besides graphics.

Download a sample of the 555 and SG3 here

[andreiS]

Hi, can anyone re-upload the files please? the links are dead

[mandel99]

Pharaoh extracted into many DAT files which need to be further extracted.

The dat files are pharaoh save files just rename *.dat to *.sav and copy to saves folder