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Guest · Last edited by Guest on Mon Apr 04, 2005 1:20 am; edited 5 times in total

Ok, within each savefile directory is a file called PARAM.SFO that contains interesting data. I wrote a program to parse the fields within that file and print them out. Naturally, there are still mysteries within that file.

The firmware updates also contain a similar file that can be parsed by this program.

Enjoy!

ooPo · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 7:38 am Post subject:

Pretty!

Guest · Last edited by Guest on Sat Jan 08, 2005 10:11 pm; edited 1 time in total

From the PSP memstick:/PSP/SAVEDATA/UCJS10001 (savegame dir)

Running the program produces this output:

Guest · Last edited by Guest on Sat Jan 08, 2005 10:11 pm; edited 1 time in total

Not just savegames PARAM.SFO can be read. There is a similar file, probably by the same name, included in the "Oopo's Bane" firmware download package.

Here is output from the program:

Guest · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 8:27 am Post subject:

Now for some more commentary,

The files in question appear to contain paramters/environment that are relevant to the respective functions of the "saves". In the case of hot shotz golf, that was a bonafide savegame. In the case of the firmware update, its more relevant to the act of updating firmware.

There are still some fields of the header and sections that I haven't figured out.

Also, especially in the hot shots golf save, there are from data fields that appear to contain, not just specific basic data types, but extended data types.

Given the heavy usage of offsets and strings in these files, it offers interesting possibilities for naughty tinkering.

ooPo · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 11:35 am Post subject:

ooposbane.sfo

I like it. :)

Guest · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 10:05 pm Post subject: Ridge Racers

Here is a savegame, from Ridge Racers, which has much more in terms of embedded data. For instance. DATA.BIN is seen in the hexdump, but it isn't seen by the program because it can't understand the huge data blob that happens to contain that string.

Also, some of the string data is in Japanese. You should be able to see some Kanji and Katakna text. You may need to set UTF-8 encoding in your browers to see it properly.

Here is the PARAM.SFO parsing:

beatwho · Joined: 15 Dec 2004 Posts: 28

so i tried to get it working, copied the data into a psp.c
make psp
ran it..

Seg fault?

tried it with another game... same thing

what am I doing wrong?

edit: removed links

Guest · Posted: Sun Jan 09, 2005 3:50 pm Post subject:

I tried your dokodemo save and it worked fine for me.

I haven't tested this on platforms over than Mac OSX, but its written so that it should work with no problem anywhere POSIX. Anyhow please let me know the following:

1. Are there any messages (warnings, etc...) printed when you compile it ?
2. Does the program manage to print ANYTHING when its run, besides segfault ?
3. Anyhow, I made one modification to the program to check if the mmap call succeeds and print a message if it doesn't. Otherwise, if it fails, a segfault will occur for sure (though dunno why it should fail). Anyhow, try recopying and rerunning the program and let me know if anything gets printed out at all.

beatwho · Joined: 15 Dec 2004 Posts: 28

[root@heis psp]# make psp
cc psp.c -o psp
[root@heis psp]# ls
PARAM.SFO psp psp.c
[root@heis psp]# ./psp
mmap failed!: Invalid argument
[root@heis psp]# uname -a
Linux heis.nakedinjapan.net 2.4.27 #1 Wed Nov 17 20:29:58 JST 2004 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

well there ya go, looks like it opens the file fine then mmap fails. I might go read the man page for mmap since i've never even heard of it before :)

Thanks

edit: I changed the mmap stuff to fopen/fread and it worked ^_^

Guest · Posted: Sun Jan 09, 2005 5:18 pm Post subject:

Guest · Posted: Sun Jan 09, 2005 9:18 pm Post subject:

Ok, I updated the program listing at the top of this thread with the newest version that removes the mmap() and replaces it with standard file i/o routines to accomplish the same thing. It should now be more portable.

annerajb · Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 40

this my seen like a noob question but. how the you compile this program. and what is made in c c++ . btw i have visual basic .net

DBG · Joined: 28 Mar 2005 Posts: 12

You will need a C compilier, personally I use www.cygwin.com or www.mingw.org. There are lots of how-to's out there, but if you need more help just ask. I don't believe VB can handle the file, but if you have access to Visual Studio you should be able to copy the text into a .c file and build that.

Deathbringer · Joined: 01 Apr 2005 Posts: 11

Can someone compile it for me? Since my good pc are screved up and this machine has Admin lock so i cant install anything...

Grover · Joined: 23 Feb 2005 Posts: 50

Wondering about these bin files - assuming they are binary files. Is it possible these are executed mips binaries? Or (more likely) specific binary data dictating the way background is drawn, and other effects (sound/music?).
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XenuPSP · Joined: 04 Apr 2005 Posts: 3

FYI--

I've got this compiled and running on my WinXP box using MinGW tools. Running it against an Untold Legends .SFO, I noticed a character in the data section was being gobbled up. I corrected it by changing the fopen() mode from "r" to "rb".

Guest · Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 1:19 am Post subject:

LiquidIce · Joined: 04 Apr 2005 Posts: 55

This is good stuff gorim, thanks!

I compiled this under WinXP using cygwin, worked flawlessly.

Here is the output of some of my game saves if anyone is intrested:

Guest · Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 1:36 am Post subject:

ModernRonin · Joined: 07 May 2005 Posts: 10 Location: Colorado

I added some typedefs to your code to make this compile under Visual C++ 6.0 on Win98. Three typedefs:

Guest · Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 4:01 pm Post subject:

Hey thanks for the update on letting people know how they can compile it on win98! Do newer windows platforms understand the u_intX_t types ? Or is that just a GCC thing ?

The reason I stuck with the u_intX_t types is to guarantee hardware neutrality as much as possible, and to be as specific as possible in how large struct members in the file are.

I may merge this in to the main PARAM.SFO source via #ifdefs platform checks if there is enough demand for win98, or I can just let you maintain that variant of the source.

ModernRonin · Joined: 07 May 2005 Posts: 10 Location: Colorado

Hey thanks for the update on letting people know how they can compile it on win98!

I'm kinda curious if my executable works under 2k or XP. Actually, I'm curious if it even works on someone else's 98 box. For all I know it may depend on some weirdo DLL that only I have.

Do newer windows platforms understand the u_intX_t types ? Or is that just a GCC thing ?

I don't know. We have a couple of people here who seem to have VC++ 7.0 (.NET edition or something), maybe one of them can try and compile it and tell us.

The reason I stuck with the u_intX_t types is to guarantee hardware neutrality as much as possible, and to be as specific as possible in how large struct members in the file are.

Yeah, I think that's a good thing. That's why I put in typedefs instead of just search and replacing the code. Actually, at first I tried to make it even simpler, using #defines. But that breaks some things. The compiler doesn't seem to be able to handle casts or variable declarations with a #defined type. Don't ask me why, I have no idea...

I may merge this in to the main PARAM.SFO source via #ifdefs platform checks if there is enough demand for win98, or I can just let you maintain that variant of the source.

Probably best to merge it into the main source. I'm not sure what symbol you can check to determine if you're on a Win9X box, though... maybe there's some OS_VER() macro that I don't know about.

Ah, here we go... http://softwareforums.intel.com/ids/board/message?board.id=16&message.id=1811

Looks like you can check #if _MSC_VER == 1200. That's the giveaway that you're working with Visual C++ 6.0, which is the Win98, circa 1998 version of VC++.
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MelGibson · Joined: 10 Apr 2005 Posts: 58

Short Info: Even though it was compiled on and for win98 the program runs flawless on a win2000 /SP4 box i tested.

ModernRonin · Joined: 07 May 2005 Posts: 10 Location: Colorado

Short Info: Even though it was compiled on and for win98 the program runs flawless on a win2000 /SP4 box i tested.

Sweet! Thanks, Mel.
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larox · Joined: 04 Jul 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Singapore

hey guys, can I ask you all some questions?
From the above posts, there is this u_int32_t thing...
I don't know what is it for, can you guys tell me?
is u_int32_t same as uint32_t ? And what is uint32_t used for?
Sorry for the questions, I am new to software development.
Thanks
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Guest · Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 5:39 pm Post subject:

u_int32_t == unsigned integer 32 bit type.

uint32_t is almost certainly the same thing, just without an underscore.

Is it quite common for people to use typedef's or #define's in order to make such types less awkward. Also, different compilers might define them different ways. I really don't know if this is a compiler implementation-dependant issue, but it appears to be.

In your case, I don't really know if uint32_t is a compiler defined type, a standard #include defined type, or is in some user created source file. Nor would I know if it is #define'd or typedef'ed in the include file if that was the location. Check your compiler's manual.

Anyhow, as I mentioned, the reason for being specific, is that things such as "long" and "int" are actually vague with respect to the size of the type in terms of bits - they are hardware platform dependant.

larox · Joined: 04 Jul 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Singapore

thanks alot for help. i am actually intending to do up my project which i think might require this uint32_t data type for the assigning of static ip address.

good day.~
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LanThief · Joined: 18 Jan 2006 Posts: 1 Location: Austin, TX

I was searching on PARAM.SFO files when I came across this thread, and found this C example very helpful. Thanks Chris Barrera for the code example. I do most of my game development in Python so after using this C example last night, I took a crack at it in Python for anyone interested.

Yes, there are more mysteries to uncover and so there will be more edits to come as we all contribute to the C example.

Cheers !

PSP250 · Joined: 19 Nov 2005 Posts: 12

Good Job.

From my memdumps I could note these stubs are used for retrieving the information:

sceSystemFileGetIndexInfo
sceSystemFileGetIndex
sceSystemFileLoadIndex
sceSystemFileLoadAll2

Anyone actually succeeded in doing this on the PSP itself?