I have developed a little program to extract all the “significant” files from Microprose adventure games resource files I was speaking about some days ago; the reason for it should be interesting for the few interested into, is that it can decompress files containing text and some graphics. It is far from being perfect, and I think it is a bit “buggy”, for instance it extracts “credits.txr” file even when it shouldn’t, and it should to be revisited, but it works, all in all. If anybody out there wants to begin to translate a Microprose adventure game waiting for a tool that can insert translated texts back into resource files, well, he’s welcome.

You can download the program executable from here: extracthag.exe. It works in a pretty intuitive way. First of all it is a console application, this means that it must to be launched from the command prompt. It should be launched on a *.HAG file, even if I tested it just with the usual GLOBAL.HAG, the file containing all the descriptions and captions.

I hope this could help finding someone that can work on the compression algorithm.

Enjoy.

Info sobre MESSAGES.DAT:

Punteros:
0x00000006 - Aquí empiezan los punteros con 76 40 (40 76, acordaos que hay que darles la vuelta); el siguiente puntero salta 8 bytes, sería 1b 41 (41 1b), etc.

Entre medias hay un valor hexadecimal que es la longitud del texto descomprimido (del italiano).
Antes de los punteros va la numeración de las frases.

He probado el programa y te permite descomprimir los archivos del algoritmo (del italiano). Me gustaría hacer unas pruebas para ver si MESSAGES.DAT modificado funciona sin compresión o hay algún byte que determine si hay o no hay compresión o si directamente no te deja.