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Reply to Re: How to read and unpack dir.ff files

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December 13th 2014, 09:40 PM
peasantmb.gif
yEoldetoast
Peasant They/Them Australia
LOOK UPON MY DEFORMED FACE! 
I had a look for some additional history and I found some info for Microsoft Fastfile on a ROM hacking site. The Fastfile format source was included with DirectX 5 primarily for game developers. It seems the main advantage was improved loading times (hence the name) and reduced disk usage when implemented as intended. The format does not appear to have been used for many games though.

However, the intended method of use was to include every data file into a fastfile package, but RTSoft were lazy and made individual files for each graphics path which means that the benefits were never realised. In fact Seth could have used a dir.ff file for all the scripts instead of wasting time implementing the encoding for .d files.

Seth's included ffcreate.exe was apparently buggy which is why FFCreate 2 was developed by Redink. As a result there seems to be problems with certain dir.ff files such as the one in Mystery Island; unpacking it results in around 250MB of files using my self-made unpacker. Seth wised up when creating Mystery Island and decided to implement FastFile properly and as a result made sure to pack all of the graphics in a "newer" FastFile format that allowed for subdirs and proper file paths as originally intended. I doubt it helped make downloading any faster though

Funnily enough iOS Dink uses a standard zip file named "Dink.pak" in order to store graphics, map data and scripts meaning Seth eventually did get around to archiving the data properly.