DID.DAT files and their contents

DID’s Air Dominance Fighter and Total Air War.
mikew
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DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

We’ve visited this subject over the last decade or so, and have extracted most files of interest I think.
I don’t seem to have an overall picture of where we are for any particular game though. Instead, I have many directories splattered over various PCs and USB drives each containing hundreds of game files.

It would be nice to have some sort of centralised repository from which we could repack dat files at leisure.

Anyway, this thread is just to see if someone has done this already….and if not, to nag me into doing it.
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

mikew wrote: 2023-Mar-06, 21:11Instead, I have many directories splattered over various PCs and USB drives each containing hundreds of game files.
So do I!
It would be nice to have some sort of centralised repository from which we could repack dat files at leisure.
Absolutely!
mikew
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

OK, well the TFX3 games are the most interesting where I have DID.DATs
TAW date 14th August 1998 size 63 862 711 bytes
TAWdemo 24th August 1998 size 63 094 453 bytes (This is currently unexplored)
ADF 20th November 1997 size 144 581 741 bytes
ADF has a patch and the Red Sea Operations (RSO) expansion which provide another data file called DID1ST.DAT. This comes in at least 3 sizes corresponding to Patch only, RSO only or Patch+RSO and needs some investigation.
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

For TFX2, there may be many due to various releases of the game, but we've mostly worked with the one from the EF2000 V2.0 release as it was the last:
This is dated 2nd May 1997 with size 40 484 862 bytes. The same file is used for the 3 versions of the game on the CD.

Somewhere, I have a European version of Super EF2000 which has a much larger dat file, probably due to less compression, and would be interesting to compare with the US version. I'm having trouble finding it right now.

For TFX, the file I have is dated 5th December 1993 with size 10 493 349 bytes. This is maybe not that relevant, but that game had some interesting features.
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

mikew wrote: 2023-Mar-06, 21:37ADF has a patch and the Red Sea Operations (RSO) expansion which provide another data file called DID1ST.DAT. This comes in at least 3 sizes corresponding to Patch only, RSO only or Patch+RSO and needs some investigation.
Right, DID1ST.DAT (load first) contains all patched files. DID deployed it whenever they needed to replace something from the game archive, but didn’t want to touch the original DID.DAT. Unlike, you know, current games.
mikew wrote: 2023-Mar-06, 22:07Somewhere, I have a European version of Super EF2000 which has a much larger dat file, probably due to less compression, and would be interesting to compare with the US version. I'm having trouble finding it right now.
Wait, did EF2000 have compression in the first place? Was it that JR compression? Sounds very much like something worth investigating!
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

EF2000 and TFX use RA compression. JR compression was used for EPIC, and I created an analogue in Python of what I thought the original assembly code was doing. It nearly works as I can extract most of EPIC's files. Something for another thread.

Oh no, I've just found an Italian version of TAW which has a DID.DAT dated 11th September 1998 with size 64 029 755 bytes.
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

Fun!

Find attached one from a German TAW CD-ROM – 63,918,792 B and dated 1998-08-25.


(deleted attachment)


Aaand one from an Italian ADF CD-ROM – 144,581,082 B and dated 1997-11-21. Always something new!


(deleted attachment)


Should be all I had.
mikew
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

er, thanks...

That's enough for today.
Apart from the dat files themselves, we also need the list of filenames contained within each file. So, will try to collect all I have for each game. I don't think we've identified all the files in a DID.DAT.
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Scorpion82 »

I have a copy of SEF2000. Can upload the dat, if required. I suppose I can find it on the CD. If not I keed to check whether I have an installed copy still on an external HD.
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

Sure! We should cast the iron while it’s still hot! The file is probably on the CD, but please compress it (zip or rar or 7zip) before uploading here.

Mike, if this is becoming too large, I’d be fine with only ADF+TAW for now.
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

The plan, such as it is, is to gather together all known dat files and wring as much information out of them as possible so we never have to do it again. While I don't expect to see anything amazing in the did.dat of the TAW Demo for example, there's that nagging feeling that there might be.
So, while the TFX3 games, TAW and ADF will be handled first, I hope to have enough enthusiasm to do the same exercise for EF2000. It'll be useful for the 30th Anniversary edition. :)
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

🥳🎉🥂
mikew
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

Still gathering together dat files and now have 4 TAW files for English, German, Italian and Demo versions. That will do I think.
I believe there was a TAW patch, but I don't recollect it affecting the data.

For ADF, it's more complicated. I have the main did.dat for the English and Italian versions, but the patch and RSO expansion create a new did1st.dat file which may or may not be different depending on the patch level of the game and language version.
I have did1st.dat files for the patched D3D and Glide versions, and they are the same. The same did.dat is used for Glide and D3D, so I'm going to assume that I can ignore the Glide versions of RSO.
Ideally, I'd use my English Install CD of ASDF and create all 4 possibilities of RSO for comparison, but these are 16-Bit installers, and while I can install Glide and D3D versions of the game in Linux/Wine, the patcher and RSO is proving problematic.

An alternative would be to inspect the patch and RSO installer exes to see whether there is a common data payload, but they are packed in some way.

The RSO did1st.dat that I do have contains the French and German versions of the mission text files, so I think we can assume that the French/Geramn versions of the RSO installer won't contain anything new.
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

mikew wrote: 2023-Mar-08, 13:32An alternative would be to inspect the patch and RSO installer exes to see whether there is a common data payload, but they are packed in some way.
Indeed. I had a quick look but couldn’t find the payload with either CFF Explorer, 7-Zip, or HxD. I assume it is appended to the EXE in compressed form. Ugly to investigate :(
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

Some weirdness...
did1st.dat from the patch about 2.4MB in size and contains 207 files, none of them compressed.
Of these, I can identify 171 files by name.

did1st.dat from RSO (for unpatched ADF) is about 12.5MB and contains 246 files, with some compressed.
Since we know the mission names from earlier work, I can identify 239 of these files.

These archives don't have any files in common, so theoretically, if I run the RSO installer for the patched version of ADF, the contents of the patch dat file must be added to the RSO mission files, giving a did1st.dat of about 15MB as presumably there is no did2nd.dat.

This may well be the case, but all the RSO installers are roughly the same size so it feels unlikely.
I need to be able to run the ADF patch installer, then the RSO installer to be sure. That doesn't work in Wine so need a VM with WinXP or something.
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

XP now up and running, and ADF installed from the CD. The problem is that the CD drive is the only storage device connected to the host machine that XP can see. So, a slight interlude while I try and find a writable CD to burn the patch to.

EDIT: The patch installer is about 1MB, so maybe I could use a floppy drive instead.
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

Oh well. Just a few weeks ago I threw away ~200 writable CD-ROMs because I don’t see how I would ever use them for anything 💿
mikew
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

The perfect storage medium, as those writable CDs tend to forget things after a few years.

I wasn't sure if this drive was capable of writing, but it seems to cover everything except Blu-Ray.
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-compo ... /techspec/
I'd forgotten about all those DVD standards.
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by mikew »

Turns out that I could use a 256MB USB stick to transfer files, but not a 32GB model, so I've effectively wasted one of the few remaining writable CDs in the world.
Also, I've learned to always shut down WinXP properly in a VM otherwise it will need to be reinstalled.

So, now in WinXP I can:
1. Install ADF from the CD.
2.The patch installer needs to be copied to the ADF Program directory and set to Win95 compatibility mode before running
3. RSO can be installed from its CD. Again, its 'setup.exe' needs to be set to Win95 compatibility mode.

I then saved the resulting did1st.dat files from step 2 and 3 for further analysis.

To recap, the 'patch only' did1st.dat contains 207 files and the 'RSO only' did1st.dat contains 246 files.
So, logically we could predict that 'RSO with patch' would give a did1st.dat containing 453 files and is a simple merge of the two.

But no, it contains 454. :(
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Krishty
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Re: DID.DAT files and their contents

Post by Krishty »

I have a strong feeling the surplus file will either be the source code or this sign:

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