Category / retrogaming

by ReWolf

Reverse engineering Mortal Kombat GRA file format (part 1)

Disclaimer: This post is aims at retro-gaming preservation and code-archeology. All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

GRA files are used by PC DOS version of Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 (available on GOG) to store all kind of graphics. There are two different types of GRA files:

  • compressed static images or animations – this is well-defined self-contained file format that can be easily converted to the PNG/APNG/GIF, the only obstacle is compression which has to be reverse-engineered first. I’ll refer to it as cGRA and cover that format today.
  • not compressed sprites/fonts/graphic objects/ui elements – this format is kind of a mess, it just contains encoded pixel data without any metadata. All necessary information has to be scavenged from the Mortal Kombat executable (sprites offsets, width, height, palette). I’ll refer to it as uGRA and cover that format in the part 2 of this blog post (still have to figure out a few things).

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

Reverse engineering Might and Magic III compression

I’m not quite sure how I ended up deep inside DOSBox debugger, going through 16bit assembly and recovering decompression routine used to handle MM3.CC file, but it was definitely fun. I got the game from one of the recent humble bundles and somehow (this is the part that I’m missing) I’ve found Jeff Ludwig’s page. I’ve read about his approach to modding Might and Magic III and problems related to compressed/encrypted MM3.CC data file. One of the phrases sounded like an invitation:

“It turns out that this algorithm has been a particularly tough nut to crack, and no one has come up with a viable way of decrypting the data.”

I recommend reading the whole story as his method of dealing with this problem is also great. In this post I’ll describe how I’ve handled it, in the end there will be link to the open source utility that can not only decompress, but also compress valid MM3.CC file.

Continue reading →