Decompactor

[Wrathchild]

I was looking at the hard-disk installable version of Blood Money and saw that the file BLM has multiple references to parts marked "LSD!". Are the compressed and are they able to be extracted?

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Sure. Compression is widely used in games, hard disk adaptations. And it must be extracted at some point, otherwise game will not work. Extractor code is somewhere in RAM all time.

[Wrathchild]

Would there been any (native or sources) tools to perform the decompression? Though I should think that there could be varients of the same format across time that would make an all in one tool difficult. Therefore perhaps just taking the ram dumps at various levels may provide a way to examine sprite and tile data.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Some multi format depackers for in old times popular, with Atari ST used compression methods are available. You need to do some search for them.

Examining tile and sprite data is something pretty much different. I hope, you will not jump with idea about how drawing them in your next reply

 

I often repack all this old games, because used depackers and methods are very slow, packing ratio is not much good. And they used very poor code in many cases - sometimes writing directly to TOS workspace, what can cause problems on some TOS versions.