I'm working on a tool to unpack and repack the game's data at the moment. Without that, the process is extremely manual, looking at stuff in hex editors, copying file data out to decompress, recompressing the modified files, and pasting that back into the game with necessary adjustments to related parameters by hand. Not to mention this method doesn't really support making changes that increase file size. Once I have that tool done, I'll probably make another little demo video using it with a link to a download of the unpacker/repacker in the description.

I suppose you're right. I meant for the answer to be that the developers can fine-tune their own format to their needs, like BLiNX 2 with its file duplication you won't see in those other formats. Another detail is that most common archive formats use compression that favours high compression ratios in exchange for slower decompression. If you're trying to save space on a computer or minimize the amount of data you have to send over the internet, that's a good tradeoff, but for a game developer whose main goal is to get a game loading quickly, it can be undesirable. The LZSS used in a few games I've seen is pretty quick to decompress, on the other hand. I also suspect there's an element of whether libraries are available for a given compression format with a licence that your studio is willing to use, and how easy an algorithm is to implement yourself otherwise. LZSS is again very easy to implement yourself, at least naively (as I've seen Climax do), and there's a public domain implementation that's ready to use without any restriction (as BLiNX 2 did).

Off the top of my head: - Tar doesn't support unpacking individual files without first unpacking the entire archive. - Zip compresses files "in isolation"; that is, it isn't able to deduplicate data that is the same in two files. I presume that this was to support extracting individual files. - 7z supports extracting individual files and deduplicating shared data, but likely was too uncommon to really be used "as is".

@@NS55gaming It should be. All the home console versions of the game have all three gold cars in them. It’s just that their respective builds have instances of their respective cars being used. So the other two of the gold cars that are not present are within the games files. Apparently you have to use a hex editor.

As best as I can tell, pretty much all of it seemed to be from Blinx 2's soundtrack. Was there a particular track that you were interested in?

@Revoker1221 oh man, if i were to remember 😆

It also happens today. What comes to mind is the Warriors series still packs it's data into gigantic bin files (IIRC usually names LINKDATA for whatever reason). Although they are using their own engine I think?

Oh, I almost mentioned Auriemma's work here! Earlier ideas for this video were more narrative and chronological, and would've included their IPK script for another Artoon title being used as the basis for a BLiNX 2 script many years ago. That was what I used for my original Blinx jacket mod way back then. I definitely ought to give that paper a read, too, so thanks for mentioning it (and likewise for the quick explanation of sectors that I didn't manage to fit in anywhere).

I've never seen the filesystem of the PC version, but I suspect it's pretty much the same. Most of the game's data is stored in archive.imp, with archive.bin saying which data is where (I guess you might already know this if you say you saw Gov'ner and Swoopy Do in there). I just opened archive.bin up in a hex editor, found two different car names of the same length, and swapped every instance of them. I suspect that'll work just as well on the PC version. There's also a compressed XML file that says what cars are initially unlocked and what part of the menu they appear in. I suspect I could modify this to make all three gold cars appear under the "gold" category, plus shenanigans like moving the challenge cars into another category and maybe even putting the minigame cars in a selectable category (there _is_ a "minigame" category, but it's not selectable in the garage). I've been wanting to write a program to properly unpack and repack all the data before attempting that, but I might hack something together real quick to try that idea out anyways.

@@CodeNotMagic Yes, the PC version has those two files you mentioned (archive.imp and archive.bin) and that's how I saw that the Gov'ner and Swoopy Do were there, at least their names are there... As for the second part that would be great! To be able to choose among the three golden cars, and do as you're planning. Nice find, you're awesome! 👊

I waiting for custom cars & car mods :D