An incomplete suite of tools meant to interface with previous decoders and encoders for the GBA e-Reader. This project is completely unaffiliated with anyone else.
- Python 3
- Dotcode dev package
- Windows for the trivial bat files
Imagine 4 folders:
- raw
- bin
- vpk
- dec
Summary: Go 1 through 4 to decode. Make your changes. Go from 4 through 1 to encode.
e-Reader dotcodes begin life as raw files. They are about 3 KB. Each raw file has some redundancy, and can be decoded to a bin (binary) file. Each binary is made up of what I am calling a header and 1 or more data chunks. Each chunk begins with bytes 76 70 6B 30 (vpk0), which has given them the name vpk. The chunks can be split into individual vpk files through normal, general-purpose file splitting tools. Finally, the vpks can be decompressed into plaintext / plain binaries that are interpreted by GBA and GC games. I call the decompressed / decoded files decs.
The workflow I had involves automatically converting from raw files into dec. The user manually makes edits to the decoded decs. Then they command the tools to package them back into either a raw or a bin file. (Some tools prefer bin.) The text -hax is added to the end of the filename when packaging, to avoid overwriting existing input files with hacked versions.
As fun as this project is/was at its best, debugging it and reverse-engineering e-Cards has been tiring. I don't know if I'll ever pick up this project again, so at the time being, everything here is provided as-is. Looking through the code, converting bin_to_vpk.py should function fine, but the inverse conversion vpk_to_bin has caused me some serious trouble.
On top of that, this was created to hack the e-Cards used for Animal Crossing, and documenting the format has been doubly tiring due to having a slower / less-automated workflow for testing the e-Cards in Dolphin + VisualBoyAdvance-M-WX-2.0.0-beta2.