So this appears to either be a standard tpl, or maybe one they exported with certain settings and wanted to signify as such. Going back to our test archive though, aren’t we forgetting something? What the heck was Test.tpx ? Opening it in a hex editor shows us those magic numbers: 00 20 AF 30 00. However, there is no way to tell based o the information we currently have. It’s also worth noting that this test archive could have contained other images that were overwritten or removed as needed. Additionally, different levels of image compression may look and function differently in-game. Depending on the console and media, developers may want to optimize images as best they can to reduce file size. This is clearly a test to see how different levels of image compression look/work. One Mona image is monochrome, two have transparency, and all of the character images have varying levels of compression. The key differences between all of them are image quality. It’s mostly different frames of Wario goofin’ around, and a bunch of the same Mona image. So that’s cool, we’ve got some test images now. Wimgt is incredibly thorough and will extract/convert everything. Some single TPL files can contain a huge amount of images. We can convert TPL files using a program named “ wimgt ”, which is included in the “ Wiimms SZS Tools ” suite. This is super useful information for us, since TPLs may be hiding inside of other files. These hex values are the file header used to identify a TPL file. Opening the test TPL files in a hex editor, we can see that they should always start with 00 20 AF 30 00. Developers are often free to use their own custom file formats, so not every Wii game uses TPL. SDK formats are offered by the hardware developer as a standard format created to complement the hardware itself. TPLs are the Source Development Kit image format for Wii. Next, let’s focus on Test.tpl and Test2.tpl. Test.fxm appears to be an XML file detailing the position and ID of certain images. Test.fxm, Test.tpl, Test.tpx, and Test2.tpl are our stars here. There’s a directory here conveniently named “ Test ”, so let’s dive right into that. Some games like Persona 4 hide data from other video games as their padding, but that’s a story for another article. Not only useless, but also not noteworthy. This is great in theory, but WarioWare ’s padding data is a whopping 32KB of null bytes. The “zzz” padding data is burned to the disc last and pushes the real data to the edge of the disc, allowing it to be read faster. Files of this nature are typically used to pad out the file system for disc-based games. On the root of the file system, there’s a file named zzzzzzzz.zzz. Scanning the root of the file system, we can see that things are categorized quite nicely. Now that the game’s data is accessible, we can start looking at individual files. Then under the File System tab, right-click “Disc” and select Extract All. Right-click the game in Dolphin’s directory listing and select Properties. After transferring the game to PC in ISO format, we can use Dolphin (a popular GameCube and Wii emulator) to extract the entire file system of the game. Digital copies of Wii games can be transferred from the custom drive to a PC using a program called Wii Backup Manager. This external drive needs to be custom formatted for Wii. Wii game discs can be easily dumped to an external drive by using a Wii homebrew program. I arbitrarily chose to look at WarioWare: Smooth Moves for Wii I wanted to revisit Wii file formats, since I had learned more about them recently, and I chose an interesting looking game from my library. I also want to show that behind every discovery like this, there are dozens of people who inadvertently contributed to it with their versatile programs and scripts. I’m writing this article to illustrate that anyone can make significant discoveries with publicly available programs and resources. In fact, I have fairly limited knowledge regarding actual reverse engineering. I am not an expert in any aspect of this process. Before I delve into the details behind the process, I want to give a brief disclaimer.
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