Documentation of the retail Nintendo Wii disc of Tales of Graces
(テイルズ オブ グレイセス), Namco Bandai Games / Namco Tales Studio,
10 December 2009, Japan. Game id STGJAF, one disc, one revision.
Documentation only: no game data is redistributed and nothing here is a port,
a patch or a modification. Every number below is the output of a tool in
tools/ whose report is committed in reports/.
This is the sixteenth build in the tales-blockcodec-doc corpus and the second on the Wii.
The Tales block codec is on this disc. Two decoder copies in main.dol,
in the 1997 shape, with the nine-byte header and its methods used directly —
the Metrowerks ring clear bounded by 4,078, both synthetic preload loops, the
| 0xFF00 control refill, the & 0x0FFF ring mask, the low-nibble length with
its +2, and the run escape with its +19. One 4078 and one 4079 out of
1,205,688 PowerPC instruction words; every one of the eleven 4080 sites
on the disc was disassembled and none is the codec's.
That answers the question the thirteenth build left open. Tales of Symphonia: Ratatosk no Kishi shipped on the same machine, from the same studio line, eighteen months earlier, and carried no codec. Its zero was the corpus's only Nintendo negative from inside the line, and it was compatible with the boundary being the Wii, the line, or that one project. It was that one project.
The strong test had a real denominator, for the first time on this pair.
Both builds are Metrowerks PowerPC .dol files. 872 bytes of the 2003
GameCube decoder score 138 bytes in this executable, against 10 in
Ratatosk, 12 in The Last Story, 10 in Crystal Bearers and 7
in this disc's own apploader — and the measurement is symmetric, 138 back the
other way against a floor of 8. The whole-executable search that was never
told where to look ranks the decoder first through eighth out of 77 shared
regions, and the ninth is 107 bytes and is not the decoder.
The project tag is TO10, in nineteen distinct spellings in main.dol
alone: a devkit path sim:C:/usr/TO10/data/btl/, sixteen menu-task names, a
version banner TO10_chat_v0.50, and the file name of a complete Nintendo DS
ROM the disc ships — plus two more as class names in the modules' symbol
tables (Pad_get_press__10TO10_INPUTFlUl, Check_data_func__9TO10_SAVEFv)
and a twentieth in that ROM's own banner, TO10DS. TO7 is Abyss, TO8 is Vesperia, TO9 is
Hearts. The session's prediction, written before the image was opened, was
10; the half of it that predicted a second per-machine count was wrong.
It ships a Nintendo DS game inside a Wii disc. /ds/to10dsR.srl, 1,236,168
bytes, game title ToG_DS, banner TO10DS / かめにんマーチャント！, sent to a
handheld by DS Download Play. Step zero applies in the middle of a Wii game:
its ARM9 is BLZ-packed, and decompressed it carries zero
4078/4079/4070/4071 in either ARM encoding over 67,002 ARM immediates, 98,937
THUMB literals and 376,970 aligned words. One project, two machines, and the
codec is on one of them.
It names its developer, which no build of this line in this corpus has ever
done. /module/chr_moduleRR.rso carries a complete in-house tool — a
Character Parts Editor [ROM Version] shipped on the retail disc — whose
support block reads take_njd@namco-talesstudio.co.jp and gives two URLs on
the studio's own intranet. The publisher is named twice more: in an X.509
certificate for tog-confirm.talesweb.com and in a sound-driver banner
Siren14 Version 3.02 … 2009.4.9 … NAMCO BANDAI GAMES … Nu-Sound.
RTTI is on — 195 class-and-namespace strings where Ratatosk had 37, all
of them the SDK's — and among them is TL, twenty-six classes of the
studio's engine. The corpus knew that name from Tales of Berseria (2017)
and from nowhere else. Here it is in 2009.
Since this repository was written, the corpus has opened Tales of Xillia
(PlayStation 3, 2011), which carries 80 TL:: class names — one of them,
TL::CCaptureTexture, identical to one of these twenty-six as an RTTI
symbol — and twenty-five more that are the engine's classes with that
build's project tag as a suffix. That build also shares seven of the nine
TL class names Berseria publishes for 2017, and the same two container
file names. So the chain 2009 → 2011 → 2017 is measured end to
end, and the question this repository left Open is answered: one codebase.
ps3-talesofxillia-doc.
The container is FPS4 and the packer's MSCF envelope is gone. FPS4
returns 8,064 hits and the extracted tree holds 4,832 archives; MSCF
returns zero on 4.29 GB. And the codec's plaintext is FPS4: of the
1,318 blocks the census finds, 1,162 decode to an FPS4 archive —
exactly as on Vesperia, where 3,086 of 3,095 top-level block streams began
0xAF F P S 4.
The bulk is CRI's. Three CPK containers hold 2.69 GB and two of them
hold nothing but sixty-two more CPKs; their members are CRILAYLA-packed
with the eight magic bytes overwritten with zeros, so the string
CRILAYLA returns zero hits on the whole partition and a reader keyed on the
magic silently reports thousands of members as an unknown format. The
container states each member's plaintext length and 7,115 of 7,115 packed
members reproduce it.
Six inherited tools were wrong or blind here, five of them silently and in the direction of a clean negative — including a structural probe that scored zero refills on a build whose decoder had already been disassembled. 09
| # | Claim | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The disc is STGJAF, one disc, one revision; the DATA partition is 4,286,328,832 bytes and is handed back in plaintext by the RVZ container |
Verified |
| 2 | main.dol is Metrowerks CodeWarrior PowerPC, 4,832,672 bytes of text |
Verified |
| 3 | The Tales block codec is present: one 4078 and one 4079 in two routines out of 1,205,688 instruction words |
Verified |
| 4 | Both routines carry the ring clear, both synthetic preload loops, the | 0xFF00 refill, the & 0x0FFF mask, the nibble split and the +3; the second carries the +19 run escape |
Verified |
| 5 | All eleven 4080 sites on the disc, in six distinct routines, were disassembled and none is the codec's |
Verified |
| 6 | 872 bytes of the 2003 GameCube decoder score 138 in this executable against a same-platform floor of 7–8 | Verified |
| 7 | The measurement is symmetric and the whole-file search ranks the decoder first through eighth of 77 shared regions | Verified |
| 8 | Ratatosk scores the same as two unrelated Wii titles, so it is not an intermediate step | Verified |
| 9 | The build carries the string TO10 in nineteen distinct spellings in main.dol and no other TOn anywhere |
Verified |
| 10 | TO10 means "the tenth Tales" in the sequence TO7/TO8/TO9 |
Consistent |
| 11 | /ds/to10dsR.srl is a complete Nintendo DS ROM, BLZ-packed, with no codec constants in either ARM encoding |
Verified |
| 12 | FPS4 is the studio's container here, big-endian, 4,832 archives; MSCF returns zero |
Verified |
| 13 | 1,318 blocks decode to their declared length, all in the psx dialect, 1,162 of them to an FPS4 archive and 10 to an iPck sound pack; 69 are method 0 and stored |
Verified |
| 14 | The CPK members are CRILAYLA with the magic zeroed; 7,115 of 7,115 packed members reproduce the length the container declares |
Verified |
| 15 | The disc names Namco Tales Studio, by its corporate domain, in chr_moduleRR.rso |
Verified |
| 16 | RTTI is on: 195 class-and-namespace strings, 26 of them in a TL namespace |
Verified |
| 17 | The 2009 TL and the 2017 TL of Berseria are one codebase |
Verified — via the 2011 middle: Xillia shares TL::CCaptureTexture with this build and 7 of 9 class names with Berseria, and the container FILEHEADER.TOFHDB/TLFILE.TLDAT crosses 2011→2017 by name, ps3-talesofxillia-doc |
| 18 | Which of the 2003 build's four decoder copies this one descends from | Open |
| 19 | ASKA is not here: every payload magic located and read, all inside high-entropy data, and no Aska namespace among 195 RTTI names |
Verified |
| 20 | The .txm indexes the .txv beside it |
Open — the record layout was not recovered; the 2011 build verifies the same convention on 51,694 adjacent member pairs |
| 21 | TSS, SE3 and MBIN are this build's own formats |
Open — counted and named, not decoded |
| container | RVZ, zstd level 19, 128 KiB chunks |
| image | 4,699,979,776 bytes |
| game id | STGJAF — Wii, Japan, maker AF |
| internal name | Tales of Graces; the DATA partition header says Master |
| partitions | UPDATE RELSAB 205,891,584 · DATA STGJAF 4,286,328,832 |
| apploader | 2009/06/22 |
| file system | 40 files, 6 directories, 4,040,032,865 bytes |
main.dol |
6,381,824 bytes, 10 sections, entry 0x80004050 |
| SDK | RVL_SDK, 29 component stamps, Feb 27 2009 → Jun 22 2009 |
Forty files, and three of them hold 2.69 GB. A census that stops at the FST reports a build with no assets. 02
| 01 Overview | what this build is and what it changes |
| 02 The disc | container, partitions, file system, formats |
| 03 The executable | compiler, SDK, RTTI, symbols, who made it |
| 04 Containers and assets | CPK, CRILAYLA, FPS4, Sofdec, the DS ROM |
| 05 The codec | the constant scan, the disassembly, the probe, the census |
| 06 Lineage | the strong test, the project tag, towards Ratatosk |
| 07 Budget | every byte of the partition, and what the padding is |
| 08 Leftovers | the shipped editor, the debug archive, the gaps |
| 09 Corrections | six inherited tools that were wrong or blind |
| 99 Open questions | what is unresolved, with the measurement beside it |
Python 3, standard library only, one job each.
wiirvz.py wiifs.py gcm.py rvz.py |
the container, the partition, the FST |
disppc.py dismips.py ring_sites.py |
the disassembler and the constant scan |
struct_probe_ppc.py struct_probe_arm.py nearmiss.py |
the structural probes, with --selftest |
prefix_scan.py common_run.py |
the strong test and its control |
cpk.py |
CRI's container and CRILAYLA — new here |
fps4.py |
the studio's archive, byte order detected from the archive |
tales_block.py |
the reference decoder, copied unchanged, md5 e2dcd6b8dc717b84f67bf8a46568298c |
census.py |
the blind decode census, five levels of descent |
formats.py media_census.py budget.py |
what is on the disc, and what could not be parsed |
deflate_control.py crosstitle.py magic_sweep.py |
the comparative measures |
leftovers.py internal_names.py datestamps.py manifest.py |
the leftovers |
aska.py rtti.py callsites.py |
the outward probes |
ndsrom.py ndsmodules.py ndscomp.py securearea.py |
the DS ROM inside the disc |
cab.py nintendo_comp.py |
MSCF and the Nintendo formats, kept although absent |
Code MIT (LICENSE); documentation CC BY 4.0
(LICENSE-DOCS).