Kirby Cosmic Chaos demo files - Can someone look into these?

[3dmodelingmodest]

Originally Posted by Joe Forster/STA

A hex editor, of course. I'm attaching a small program (C source and Windows executable) that can unpack those .dat files. Use it like

azounpack XXX.dat

and its contents will get extracted into a directory called "XXX" (same as the .dat file but without ".dat" extension). If you're not using Windows, you should be able to compile the C source with gcc.

(The name "azo" comes from the first three bytes of the .dat files.)

So I used your thing and all it give me is what I got, only mesh and tga they are parts of the map! but strangely the very disappointed thing is NO CHARACTER MODELS how come? One thing I noticed about your tool it doesn't extract everything Game Extractor does with the icons and textures but at least your method did bring us something and thats only few of the MESHs but why only background objects and not any of the characters? I have a weird feeling that the character meshes must be still in the dat's, only what we are doing so far is not the right solution or not powerful enough to dig deeper! We must find something that will unearth more files from the DAT! one thing I did before was using a online DAT viewer and while it does not extract or pull anything out, it did find something they are GZIPs! Maybe they contain the hidden character meshes we are looking for? we got to get those GZIPs out! I found them on KCChA where the character textures are located and there might be more of those GZIPs? let me know if you got something we could try to pull those GZIPs out from DATs! Again thanks for your help but stop from there I want you to keep figuring out more if there other things you can do to try getting character models from the DAT.

[Joe Forster/STA]

(You have to unpack all eight .dat files!)

There's nothing more in the .dat files than the files my little tool can extract from them. I can load the extracted .mesh files into OGRE mesh viewer or Ogre Meshy and see the 3D models, including Kirby and his sidekick.

The GZIPs were false detection, there's no GZIP-compressed data in the .dat files. The compression algorithm of PNG pictures and GZIP archives is similar ("deflate", a derivative of LZ77) but that doesn't make PNG pictures special cases of GZIP.

[3dmodelingmodest]

Originally Posted by Joe Forster/STA

(You have to unpack all eight .dat files!)

There's nothing more in the .dat files than the files my little tool can extract from them. I can load the extracted .mesh files into OGRE mesh viewer or Ogre Meshy and see the 3D models, including Kirby and his sidekick.

The GZIPs were false detection, there's no GZIP-compressed data in the .dat files. The compression algorithm of PNG pictures and GZIP archives is similar ("deflate", a derivative of LZ77) but that doesn't make PNG pictures special cases of GZIP.

What? you kidding me? I want you to take a look at this. Compared with your own tool, Game Extractor has done a very impressive job unearthing all of the textures and icons in the first two folders for the characters! I believe this must be all I could find for the textures and icons. As for 3D stuff I don't think GE was made for that and thats why we need another tool for the job but unfortunately it seems your method wasn't good enough but it was nice try though! I only wish theres more people answering my questions involved but Im afraid you're the only one I could find who can help. So if there is anymore you can do with a .DAT file besides extracting what very little it can pull out, I like you to try what else you can come up with because Google and Github are not giving me the best results with my search! I only hope you or someone else might figure this out.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/75axu...p+new.zip/file

This is what the Game Extractor got for me. I also used Dragon Unpacker which doesn't open DAT sadly. So GE did a better job than Dragon Unpack and only that your tool did got me at least few of the MESH files of only the background objects such as floors and plants but no characters yet!

[Joe Forster/STA]

Originally Posted by 3dmodelingmodest

Compared with your own tool, Game Extractor has done a very impressive job unearthing all of the textures and icons in the first two folders for the characters!

Apparently, my tool didn't extract all files. (This is a very simple program I wrote upon reading your initial request. Game Extractor works very differently.) I found a bug that possibly cause this and fixed it; please, try extraction again with the program attached.

For each .dat file, the total size of files extracted from it must be at most a few kilobytes less than the original size of the .dat file. (The missing size is the directory in the .dat file that lists the files inside it.)

[3dmodelingmodest]

Originally Posted by Joe Forster/STA

Apparently, my tool didn't extract all files. (This is a very simple program I wrote upon reading your initial request. Game Extractor works very differently.) I found a bug that possibly cause this and fixed it; please, try extraction again with the program attached.

For each .dat file, the total size of files extracted from it must be at most a few kilobytes less than the original size of the .dat file. (The missing size is the directory in the .dat file that lists the files inside it.)

All thanks to you good sir! 👍 We finally got more than just background models saved! We got the characters but it seems not all of them are labeled properly? I see a bunch of MESHs with mixed numbers and letter names so they have to be viewed in order to find out what they might be! The ones with names I can tell you they are

Birdon, Efrite, Capsule J and J2, Poppy Bros, but strangely I don't see Kirby or those 2 available helpers shown maybe they're one of the models with mixed up names? the good thing is we finally got some of GBAKirbster's models saved! He used to be a member of the development team for the fan project. While most of the 3d models were done by project leader and lead artist Minon, very few of Kirbster's own models involved with the project only got used. The rest of Kirbster's work was kept privately on his own PC and a old gallery portfolio from abandoned website Rainbow Resort where you can still see his old models there but sadly most of them were never been used in the demo or recovered til now!👍

The only models that would never get left out unused in any of the demos are the Touhou characters in their original human forms not the deformed Kirby versions since those models were made for another separate project that never got leaked or released to the public but thankfully with Ai tools like Google Flow, those can be recreated for preservation including other Kirby characters that did not appear in the demo or only in sketch concept art for this project!

I will send you screenshots if I find anything! 😄

[3dmodelingmodest]

Originally Posted by Joe Forster/STA

(You have to unpack all eight .dat files!)

There's nothing more in the .dat files than the files my little tool can extract from them. I can load the extracted .mesh files into OGRE mesh viewer or Ogre Meshy and see the 3D models, including Kirby and his sidekick.

The GZIPs were false detection, there's no GZIP-compressed data in the .dat files. The compression algorithm of PNG pictures and GZIP archives is similar ("deflate", a derivative of LZ77) but that doesn't make PNG pictures special cases of GZIP.

Unless I did something wrong on my end, I'll try again to be sure! What I did was dragging the DAT to your tool where it extracts the DAT. a black screen appeared and it did extract but why I am only getting MESHs of the background and not the characters doesn't make sense to me? That's why I am going to try again and if I am not getting character models from this I might ask you to try sending them to me instead? I think that should do! Let me know if you can send me the character models you got from your extracting if your tool didn't work for me. Just send yours over to me and I'll take a look what you got! 👍