Ascendancy
Choose archive extension:
COB
- Format Type : Archive
- Endian Order : Little Endian
Format Specifications
uint32 {4} - Number Of Files
// for each file
- char {50} - Filename (null)
// for each file
- uint32 {4} - File Offset
byte {X} - File Data
MultiEx BMS Script
Set DUMMYL Long 50 ; Get FILECNTL Long 0 ; Set DUMMYL Long DUMMYL ; Math DUMMYL *= FILECNTL ; SavePos FILESTART 0 ; SavePos TAILSIZEU 0 ; Math TAILSIZEU += DUMMYL ; Math FILECNTL -= 1 ; Do ; GoTo FILESTART 0 ; GetDString FILENAME 50 0 ; SavePos FILESTART 0 ; GoTo TAILSIZEU 0 ; Get FILEOFF Long 0 ; SavePos TAILSIZEU 0 ; Get FILESIZE Long 0 ; Math FILESIZE -= FILEOFF ; Log FILENAME FILEOFF FILESIZE 0 0 ; Math EXTRCNT += 1 ; While EXTRCNT <> FILECNTL ; GoTo FILESTART 0 ; GetDString FILENAME 50 0 ; SavePos FILESTART 0 ; GoTo TAILSIZEU 0 ; Get FILEOFF Long 0 ; GoTo EOF 0 ; SavePos FILESIZE 0 ; Math FILESIZE -= FILEOFF ; Log FILENAME FILEOFF FILESIZE 0 0 ;
Compatible Programs
Subformats
Ascendancy has a number of proprietary formats in the COB file. All of the non-audiovisual stuff is stored as CSV. Some formats are defined below:
RAW
Raw, 22050Hz PCM audio. (I'll look up endianness and other details ASAP)
VOC
Creative VOiCE files [1].
SHP
Ship visuals. All little-endian Main file header:
Offset Size Value 0x00 4 bytes Magic number: 0x30312E31 0x04 4 bytes Number of ship images in file 0x08 4 bytes Offset into file of color palette for ship 1 0x0C 4 bytes Offset into file of image for ship 1 0x10 4 bytes Offset into file of color palette for ship 2 0x14 4 bytes Offset into file of image for ship 2
From: http://80.126.249.96/users/mark/public/ascendancy/documentation/shp.html
FNT
From: http://80.126.249.96/users/mark/public/ascendancy/documentation/fnt.html
Font File Format
Author would like to thank authors of the following tools (in no particular order) for providing the information about the shape file format (which is the same in The Tone Rebellion and an older game from The Logic Factory, Ascendancy):
- Ascendancy Font Editor v1.1+ by Roman Tkachuk (2:4600/68.2@fidonet),
- ascendancy utilities by Darcy (@daumiller).
The Tone Rebellion fonts are known to have the header of the following structure: - version, 4 bytes: "1.\0\0", - character-count, 4-byte unsigned integer (it’s unknown whether it’s actually signed or unsigned, because we have font specimen consisting of more than 226 characters; for consistency, let’s consider it unsigned, even if all the other tools read it as signed), - rows-per-character, 4-byte unsigned integer, - transparent-color, 4-byte unsigned integer (considering the color indices are 1-byte long, this is a bit redundant), - offsets, array of unsigned 4-byte integers of length character-count, where every item is an offset in bytes for the corresponding character data to be placed, - character data array (until the end of the file).
Every known font file has exactly 226 characters, which seems to correspond to characters of the code page 437 (starting from code 0).
Every character corresponds to the following structure:
columns, 4-byte unsigned integer,- byte array of
rows-per-character×columns, storing the color data.
The color data is meant to be an array of indices corresponding to some palette, except for one color, marked by color transparent-color, which is transparent (despite what the palette says).
Certain characters may have zero columns defined; this means those characters are absent from the font.
Read more about palettes in corresponding format description.
Oddities
Character with index 225, which normally looks like ß in the code page 437, for some reason looks more like ¡ in the fonts (in smfont.fnt, it is also the same as i, but from the bigfont.fnt, we can conclude it looks exactly like an inverted exclamation mark).