Poking through the Suikoden IV disc

[Admiral Ackbar]

The "hidden descriptions" in Suikoden 3 were secret investigations from Kidd. If you looked at the data with a special program on your computer, you could read all of the text in the game (as stated above). It revealed hidden investigations for characters that were not Stars of Destiny. These were most likely added in as jokes, because they say sarcastic and non-serious things. For instance, Sana's says "Old hag" if I remember correctly. Leknaat's said "The villain of Suikoden X" or something to that effect. Probably just game makers killing time and goofing off. Nothing to take seriously.

Though, it does make my "Leknaat is secretly evil" theory slightly more believable...
_________________

[Tendou Souji]

Now THAT'S a theory!!! :mrgreen:
An evil Leknaat!Wonder if they would make it come true...

[Beecham]

I'm more of the school of thought that Leknaat is by definition "good," at least from a Suikoden definition of the word. Genso Suikoden seems to exist in a world where there is a tao-like existance, only instead of yin and yang you have order and chaos. As the Executor of Balance, Leknaat leans neither towards order and chaos; if you extend the tao analogy, neither yin and yang are evil... it is -inbalance- between the two that leads to evil. So is true with order and chaos. Evil stems from an imbalance of these two naturally complementing and opposing forces. Thus, good is -defined- by balance.

[Pyriel]

A fair amount of the data in the .bin files on the disk is actually code. The main executable loads in memory at 0x280008, and much, if not all, of the non-kernel memory above that address is "overlay" space into which event-specific code is loaded. For example, the Rita-pon game code is loaded as needed, and battle related code gets pulled from FILEDATA.BIN and loaded somewhere around 0x1A0000. Obviously those files contain quite a few different types of data, but just one more thing to watch out for.

The last time I looked, memory dumps of the game contain no recognizable ASCII strings. At least not with respect to character names and the like. It is possible they are compressed in the file, however they are also probably stored in some other encoding. I briefly searched for certain names using unicode strings, and encoding sequences from certain fonts favored by Japanese PS2 developers, and came up dry. Finding the scripts and such could be fun.

Also, the code segments stored in the .bin files are not compressed. That may or may not mean anything. The developers could have stored different types of data with and without compression as they saw fit.

[NichtWahr]

Thanks for the more technical view of things, Pyriel. I'm not too much for debugging and such; the closest I've come to that are a cross-compiled 'objdump' and 'strings' to see if I could pick out the data more easily.
You mentioned memory dumps; might you be willing to share any, for research purposes? Saved games might be helpful, too. (There's apparently one on GameFAQs, but at 426 bytes, I suspect it ain't the whole thing...)

[Loopy]

This looks like it could be quite enlgihtening :)

I'm a little too busy with school to help right now, but I'm curious to see what you guys find.

[MichaelW]

HOLY S****!!!!! :shock: I think I may have just accessed the entire dialouge for Suikoden 4!

But the thing is I open it up with "WordPad" and it all is in japanese letters.

Do I do it correctly? (I put the CD in the DVD Rom, I have a Windows XP, then I click on CD Drive E and I cliked on the FileData whate er tpye, but sometiems it takes too long. So did I do it right? WHat program do I open it up with?

I think someone should use this to make an entire script for Suikoden 4 (and maybe Suikoden 3) for gamefaqs. I want to do one. But it's stressful by typing it from the game and etc.

[kuwaizair]

oh now thats what we can't do.
a scrip would be fun...we can make a play or somthing. or use it for a comic.
or snipit some premo qutes.

so what else can you find?
_________________
few runes short of a set of 27

[Loopy]

...I don't think you found what you think you found. If you see Japanese characters, then most likely WordPad is attempting to display non-text data as though it were text, and some the data happens to fall in a range of bytes that happens to correspond with a Japanese encoding.

The FILEDATA.* files represent gigabytes of data, only a tiny fraction of which (if any) could be text, and none of which is readable without determining how it is encoded and using special software to decode it.

The total script of the game is probably far less than 0.1% of the size of those files.