The quest for FF7 PSX opening data.

[NERV Agent]

Some of you who were in the chat room last night (Remnant-of-VII being one of them) might know what this is about.

A long time ago I used to do some ROM hacking on the PSX, but stopped when IRL happened.

Because of this prolonged hiatus, I've forgotten a lot and must re-learn.

I intend on doing some minor projects just to re-orient myself with all this. I probably won't release any of this, as this is for my own re-education. (But it might snowball into an entirely new project.)

My first project is to edit the title screen of Final Fantasy VII for the PSX. Where is the title screen data stored? I asked the folks at Qhimm.com about this, and they can't seem to remember.

I assumed these are ".TIM" files somewhere on the CD(s), but after I used PSicture to scan every directory, I still can't find it (but the program crashes when scanning the "WORLD" folder).

I also found this on the CD(s)

FINALFANTASY7/STARTUP/SCEAP.LZS

I thought it might be in here, so I tried using qt-lzs 1.2 and LZSCompress/DECompress v0.9.6 to decompress SCEAP.LZS, but all I got was a weird 600 KB file. I opened that weird file in a hex editor, and it was mostly 0s with some data in the middle.

Where is this title screen data?

 

[NERV Agent]

What is the filename of the title screen data in the PC version of FF7? It might be a clue to where it is stored in the PSX version. (I do not own the PC version.​

 

[NERV Agent]

I know I am bumping this up, but I've ran into some stuff.

I was looking through the FF7Tools README and found this:

Examples
for 'binlz' files are MOVIE/OPENING.BIN (opening credits) and
MOVIE/STAFF*.BIN (end credits).

Then I searched Google for "Final Fantasy VII opening.bin" and one of the results had this:

* The opening credits which play over the Prelude theme on the title
screen. These are stored as TIM images in the file MOVIE/OPENING.BIN
which can be extracted with 'unbinlz' and 'tim2png'.

https://github.com/cebix/ff7tools

So I used FF7Tools. "unbingz" wouldn't work, giving me "IOError: Not a gzipped file".

But "unbinlz" worked, giving me a bunch of ".data" files instead of ".TIM" files.

How do I view these ".data" files? I think I'm getting closer.

Also, if the mods can please approve this post, as I am onto something that the Qhimm folks couldn't find.

 

[NERV Agent]

YES!!!

I can use PSicture to view them!

Now, how do I turn ".bmp" files into ".data" files to be reinserted into the ISO?