PSP Save Files [demistified] ...almost!

[Urb85]

Hi all, I am pretty new to this forum but have been following it quietly "behind the scenes".

Quite interested on the "reverse" side of the PSP (even if I don't own one yet), I tried to help this great community of PS2Dev and actually I found something interesting that maybe could help one or two in this Forum:

If we look at the savedata of for example "Ridge Racer", we are able to see that 4 files have been created:

[DATA.BIN] [ICON0.PNG] [ICON1.PMF] and [PARAM.SFO];

having a more in depth look at the file PARAM.SFO we are able to find some nice little information on how the PSP saved the data, and thanks to Gorim at this post http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php? ... hlight=sfo we can see that he was able to parse that information and show in a more formal order...

Now what I tried is to go inside the PARAM.SFO file, copied all the information inside and pasted into a little nice program, called NJSTAR, which on my UK version of WinXp allows me to read Japanese chracters, so all the information found on that file, now is moslty demistified;

Looking at what is inside the Ridge Race PARAM.SFO file in the normal Notepad, all the information comes up like this:

Code: Select all

  PSF  ”                    	           f         ( 
   @     ;  `  `  H  N  €   €   ¨  ^    €   (  m    €   ¨  CATEGORY PARENTAL_LEVEL SAVEDATA_DETAIL SAVEDATA_DIRECTORY SAVEDATA_FILE_LIST SAVEDATA_PARAMS SAVEDATA_TITLE TITLE  MS     「リッジレーサーズã€�ゲームデータ
プレイヤー�ーム：anoop
走行�離：0km
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              ULJS00001000                                                    x_i                            DATA.BIN     mt@/ü˜mb‹›h>3á                                                                                                                                                                                                                     3Â^ùi³žÈÅjU½jLH7êö$9óT¾þk°Ý˜£ù¢                                                                                ゲームデータ                                                                                                              リッジレーサーズ  
 

When I then tried to paste all this scrubble incomprensible language into NJStar this is what it come out like:

Code: Select all

  CATEGORY PARENTAL_LEVEL SAVEDATA_DETAIL SAVEDATA_DIRECTORY SAVEDATA_FILE_LIST 
SAVEDATA_PARAMS SAVEDATA_TITLE TITLE  MS     「リッジレーサーズ」ゲーム
データ
廛譽ぅ筺璽諭璽燹пnoop
・垉・ァОkm

So doing a little bit of translation I was then able to see little informations like the Player name, in this case "noop", and how many Km's he/she has done since, and in this case "0Km", the other information like:

「リッジレーサーズ」ゲームデータ

is the title, and in this case: "Ridge Racer Game Data";

We can see also that this file calls as reference another file the DATA.BIN, where for sure contains all the information about the Saved Data itself;

I found also more info about ICON1.PMF and more presumably is a little video that the PSP displays while the user is exploring the save data on memstick.

I have got more info about the other files available in the saved data, as the AT3 file and the FLEXlm license that some Japanese uses and put inside the memstick with all the other saved stuff.


I hope this is a little bit of help, I am creating a small program that maybe allow this info to be displayed into a more user friendly GUI! See u soon!

[mc]

http://mc.pp.se/psp/psf.xhtml

The string you were looking at was the SAVEDATA_DETAIL, to be displayed in the savegame menu. All TXT type fields are UTF-8 encoded, so you need some UTF-8 capable text viewer to display them correctly, yes.

See also http://mc.pp.se/psp/mstree.xhtml

[Urb85]

Thanks a lot for the nice link you gave me, but I found some other interesting news about the stuff inside the SAVE_DATA, I found that the .at3 file is:

a wav file.
With 2 Channels, 44 Khz sample rate, 128 Kbit/sec.
Media Type 0:
--------------------------
AM_MEDIA_TYPE:
majortype: MEDIATYPE_Audio {73647561-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71}
subtype: Unknown GUID Name {E923AABF-CB58-4471-A119-FFFA01E4CE62}
formattype: FORMAT_WaveFormatEx {05589F81-C356-11CE-BF01-00AA0055595A}
bFixedSizeSamples: 1
bTemporalCompression: 0
lSampleSize: 744
cbFormat: 52

WAVEFORMATEX:
wFormatTag: 0xfffe
nChannels: 2
nSamplesPerSec: 44100
nAvgBytesPerSec: 16020
nBlockAlign: 744
wBitsPerSample: 0
cbSize: 34 (extra bytes)

And while I was looking at some of my SAVE_DATA, I found that the SaveData of the game "Mojipittan", hasn't got any .BIN file but instead the actual PARAM.SFO is looking for a file called "MOJIDAJ.Dat", that actually is a FLEXlm License File, that seems to be a license from "Macrovision" which according to their website "it helps software vendors reduce unlicensed use and capture all potential revenue from new and installed-base customers".

Interesting, isn't it?

[pdc]

I believe the SND0.AT3 found on the memstick is an ATRAC3plus file.

Encoding an ATRAC3 file and calling it SND0.AT3 does the job too.
e.g. http://pdc.me.uk/psp/brit_at3/SND0.AT3 :)

Edit:

forgot to mention, ATRAC3 codec available here: http://www.minidisc.org/atrac3.zip

And despite having what is clearly a PSP-friendly ATRAC3 file, the music player still doesn't show it in the playlist...!

[Yoorah]

I believe the SND0.AT3 found on the memstick is an ATRAC3plus file.

Encoding an ATRAC3 file and calling it SND0.AT3 does the job too.
e.g. http://pdc.me.uk/psp/brit_at3/SND0.AT3 :)

Edit:

forgot to mention, ATRAC3 codec available here: http://www.minidisc.org/atrac3.zip

And despite having what is clearly a PSP-friendly ATRAC3 file, the music player still doesn't show it in the playlist...!

I believe the PSP will only recognize ATRAC files which were transfered using SonicStage.

[pdc]

I believe the SND0.AT3 found on the memstick is an ATRAC3plus file.

Encoding an ATRAC3 file and calling it SND0.AT3 does the job too.
e.g. http://pdc.me.uk/psp/brit_at3/SND0.AT3 :)

Edit:

forgot to mention, ATRAC3 codec available here: http://www.minidisc.org/atrac3.zip

And despite having what is clearly a PSP-friendly ATRAC3 file, the music player still doesn't show it in the playlist...!

I believe the PSP will only recognize ATRAC files which were transfered using SonicStage.

Does SonicStage encode ATRAC3+ format?
If so, perhaps Sony only wants to play back ATRAC3+ (not just normat ATRAC3) for DRM purposes.

If you are desparate to play an ATRAC3 file though, just call it SND0.AT3 in a save-game! There seems to be no restriction on bitrate/filesize for SND0.AT3.

I don't get the point of being semi-tight with ATRAC3 files when the PSP has mp3 playback anyway.

[Yoorah]

Does SonicStage encode ATRAC3+ format?
If so, perhaps Sony only wants to play back ATRAC3+ (not just normat ATRAC3) for DRM purposes.

If you are desparate to play an ATRAC3 file though, just call it SND0.AT3 in a save-game! There seems to be no restriction on bitrate/filesize for SND0.AT3.

I don't get the point of being semi-tight with ATRAC3 files when the PSP has mp3 playback anyway.

I know for sure that the latest version of SonicStage does let you encode in ATRAC3+ format, because that's what the latest line of MDs uses (Hi-MDs). But I had no idea people would have trouble playing ATRAC3 files -- I thought those were backwards compatible with ATRAC3+ devices...

But you are right about one thing, for sure. ATRAC3+ will sound worse than its MP3 couterpart at high bitrates. If you encode your audio at around 64Kbps, then ATRAC3+ will sound better. LAME at highest quality settings beats ATRAC3+ at high bitrates, and high bitrates are only what (most) people will use...

[Michael1980]

SonicStage 3.0 is the latest version.
It allows encoding of both Atrac3Plus and Atrac3 files.
HiMD (minidisc) play both while NetMD (previous gen) play only Atrac3.
Atrac's come with a very tight DRM, like there is no dran and drop from explorer, you have to transfer them using SonicStage.

Edit: Am I right in thinking that just by encoding an Atrac file (om*) extension and then renaming to at3 extension and sticking it to the save game file, the music would NOT play? Because if it does, then that means there is no DRM present in this case, that would be pretty big news.

[pdc]

SonicStage 3.0 is the latest version.
It allows encoding of both Atrac3Plus and Atrac3 files.
HiMD (minidisc) play both while NetMD (previous gen) play only Atrac3.
Atrac's come with a very tight DRM, like there is no dran and drop from explorer, you have to transfer them using SonicStage.

Edit: Am I right in thinking that just by encoding an Atrac file (om*) extension and then renaming to at3 extension and sticking it to the save game file, the music would NOT play? Because if it does, then that means there is no DRM present in this case, that would be pretty big news.

Standard ATRAC3 files will play as savegame music.
I have tested it with a Britney song ;)