Formats

There are approximately 5 formats per system (not counting disk images), which gives us about 40 formats to document...

If format is well-known, just put a link to a spec or a free program that can read it. Altho a summary, and eventually complete description wouldn't harm either.

If there is a better place to document a format, consider first using that place.

C64

Grouping - Unknown

Graphics - Unknown

Music - Unknown

Sound - Unknown

Saves - Unknown

Disk Image - D64

AII

Grouping - Unknown

Graphics - Unknown

Music - Unknown

Sound - Unknown

Saves - Unknown

Disk Image

DOS

Grouping - CC

Graphics - 4/16/256

Music - PC speaker "notes"

World - LAND.ORG

Saves - DAT

All DOS formats are known at this point. They are documented in the DOS Game Modding Wiki.

Amiga

Grouping - None

Graphics - Unknown, Compressed

Music - Unknown

World - LAND.ORG

Saves - DAT

Format is very close to DOS, with some alterations happening 0x8CA, and a result of 1 extra byte. Also, big-endian WORDs.

Disk Image - ADF

https://github.com/lclevy/ADFlib

PC-98

Grouping - Unknown

Graphics - Unknown

Music - Unknown

Sound - Unknown

Saves - Unknown

Disk Image - D88

FM Towns

Grouping - Unknown

Graphics - Unknown

Music - Unknown

Sound - Unknown

Saves - Unknown

Disk Image - ISO

MegaDrive

Cart Image - BIN

http://segaretro.org/BIN - Raw binary dump of the game cart.
Nothing to see here.

World - Raw

64x64x4 bytes, starting at 0x1AA8E. The indexes are the same as in the DOS version.
Small extraction utility: https://pastebin.com/2wjHAC34 .

Sprites - Uncompressed VDP tiles

Tiles - Compressed VDP tiles

Worldmap (and combatmap) tiles seem to be compressed. It's very likely, that the algorithm is http://segaretro.org/Nemesis_compression

Note: There is an LGPL library https://sourceforge.net/projects/genesiscomp/ that can uncompress it.

However, nothing is confirmed, no offsets are known, etc.

Music - YM2612 Tunes

http://segaretro.org/YM2612
There is no uniform format, so code that pulls the YM2612 registers must be found. No offsets are known as of now.

Note: There are two popular formats to represent YM2612 rips - GYM and VGM. VGM is a general-purpose chiptune format, which is not of particular interest to this project, GYMs however are much closer to what actual raw music looks like in the ROM. In either case, making in-memory representation of YM2612 music follow one of those format wouldn't harm. Just saying.

Saves - Password

This one is interesting. The whole game state is packed into a 57-byte string. Some kind of cypher is applied making it harder to crack. Nothing else is known at this point.

Mac

Disk Image - HFS

http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/filesystems/hfs.txt

Grouping - RSRC

Mac filesystems allowed each file to have 2 "forks" - "data" (for arbitary raw binary) and "resource" (for structured MAC-defined datatypes).

The game kept all of it's data in the resource fork. So, this can be seen as grouping in regards to that platform.

"Resource fork" reading is a solved problem as part of librsrc of hfsutils.
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/hfs/

Note: as of 0.0.2, librsrc (and libhfs) are bundled with openkb.

Graphics - PICT

Some graphics were kept in Mac PICT format. The format is said to be hard to parse, as it consisted of "commands" to MAC display API - "QuickDraw". Emulating the whole of QuickDraw is likely an unpleasant task, but the good news is, the game probably uses only one command and that is "plot bitmap", which would be easy to do.

No particulars are known at that point.

Graphics - Unknown

Some other graphics are apparently kept in a different format. Not much is known.

Appendix

All formats in one table.

                         Known   Well-known   Tools   Implemented
ZIP     Generic archive  [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
C64     Disk Image       [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
C64     Graphics         [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
C64     Sounds           [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
C64     Saves            [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
C64     World Data       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
AII     Disk Image       [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
AII     Graphics         [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
AII     Sounds           [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
AII     Saves            [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
AII     World Data       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
DOS     Disk Image       [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
DOS     Grouping         [x]     [ ]          [ ]     [x]
DOS     Graphics         [x]     [ ]          [ ]     [x]
DOS     Sounds           [x]     [ ]          [ ]     [x]
DOS     Saves            [x]     [ ]          [ ]     [x]
DOS     World Data       [x]     [ ]          [ ]     [x]
AMI     Disk Image       [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
AMI     Graphics         [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
AMI     Sounds           [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
AMI     Saves            [x]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
AMI     World Data       [x]     [ ]          [ ]     [x]
MAC     Disk Image       [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
MAC     Grouping (RSRC)  [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
MAC     Graphics A       [ ]     [x]          [ ]     [ ]
MAC     Graphics B       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
MAC     Sounds           [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
 MD     ROM Image        [x]     [x]          [x]     [x]
 MD     Graphics A       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
 MD     Graphics B       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
 MD     Music            [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
 MD     Saves (password) [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
 MD     World Data       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
PC98    Disk Image       [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
PC98    Grouping         [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
PC98    Graphics         [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
PC98    Music/Sounds     [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
PC98    World Data       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
PC98    Saves            [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
FMT     CD Image (iso)   [x]     [x]          [x]     [ ]
FMT     Grouping         [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
FMT     Graphics         [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
FMT     Music/Sounds     [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
FMT     World Data       [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]
FMT     Saves            [ ]     [ ]          [ ]     [ ]

* "Known" means format was understood / or was already well-known.
* "Well-known" refers to IT community at large.
* "Tools" are third-party open-source tools that can read it.
* "Implemented" denotes if that format is part of openkb codebase.

ZIP is a file archival format, that has nothing to do with King's Bounty.
However, since most files are distributed in that way, it would be nice
to get zip-reading into openkb.

NOTE: Some additional formats might arise, some might get squashed.