TETRA MASTER

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Originally Posted by Dragoy

Won't even power on?

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Power on, caps lock flashes, power off without screen activation. Machine as a whole is toast, but it's probably just one failed component; doesn't get far enough to try to read the HD, so that could still be salvageable.

Depending on when Tetra Master got dropped, I might have the goods on the machine that replaced that, but that doesn't power on at all; if I'm lucky, it's just a drained battery, but I don't know where the charger is to find out.

... so, in checking timeline to decide whether that's worth doing, I discovered that the Final Fantasy fandom wiki (I know, ew) has a sheet showing all the cards. It's low-resolution, but it's something?

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Originally Posted by Zenion

Power on, caps lock flashes, power off without screen activation. Machine as a whole is toast, but it's probably just one failed component; doesn't get far enough to try to read the HD, so that could still be salvageable.

Depending on when Tetra Master got dropped, I might have the goods on the machine that replaced that, but that doesn't power on at all; if I'm lucky, it's just a drained battery, but I don't know where the charger is to find out.

... so, in checking timeline to decide whether that's worth doing, I discovered that the Final Fantasy fandom wiki (I know, ew) has a sheet showing all the cards. It's low-resolution, but it's something?

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I know it sounds stupid but try checking the cmos battery. Some machines, especially laptops, won't boot without a working one.

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Originally Posted by Zenion

Power on, caps lock flashes, power off without screen activation. Machine as a whole is toast, but it's probably just one failed component; doesn't get far enough to try to read the HD, so that could still be salvageable.

Depending on when Tetra Master got dropped, I might have the goods on the machine that replaced that, but that doesn't power on at all; if I'm lucky, it's just a drained battery, but I don't know where the charger is to find out.

... so, in checking timeline to decide whether that's worth doing, I discovered that the Final Fantasy fandom wiki (I know, ew) has a sheet showing all the cards. It's low-resolution, but it's something?

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It does seem to be alive, but indeed, would need the cord-of-power to get anything done.

And yeah, ew, but neat! ^^;

Thanks for trying!

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

I know it sounds stupid but try checking the cmos battery. Some machines, especially laptops, won't boot without a working one.

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Yeah... I tried googling the problem, the solutions I found were basically, like... "replace something." Flashing caps lock is a general hardware fault on that model, CMOS battery worked for some users, memory cards for some, pretty much just "take it apart and replace bits until it works."

Luckily, the SATA-USB adapter that I thought was junk was just the thing for this job.

So, I got into my old TetraMaster folder. Seven suspect files.

gW000.dat (1,027 kb)
gW001.dat (461 kb)
gW002.dat (502 kb)
gW003.dat (258 kb)
gW080.dat (109 kb)
gW101.dat (910 kb)
gW201.dat (599 kb)

So, most of those sound pretty small, but 000, 101, and 201 seem like sensible sizes for sheets of cards that sections would be picked from to display textures? Dat is a bit of a nuisance format, I can only think of like four programs that handle it and two are pretty strictly tied to the FFXI file structure so I'm not sure if they'll like random files. I'll play around with AltanaView and see if I can make it dance. Hopefully results to come.

EDIT: Noesis, AltanaView, and ChangeTex agree, those ain't image files, at least not in a format similar enough to main FFXI dats to be read.

Yeah, those are what I saw, the most prominent things there be, but not for them cards.

Cracking the file open in Notepad++ is... well, exactly as helpful as it sounds, just garbled nonsense. However, the string "OPTPiX iMageStudio 3.0 http://www.webtech.co.jp/" appears repeatedly. That is, apparently, an image optimization program, which leads me to believe that those are indeed supposed to be image files. We just don't have the technology to decode them because they aren't built quite like the ones used in FFXI proper. Feels like a dead end; I'm inclined to say we have what we're looking for, and just have no idea how to use it.

Pity you can't just open up PlayOnline without connecting and having updates pushed, that might have been an avenue to get a look at the files in their original context, though I suspect you'd only be allowed to see cards in your personal collection that way anyway.

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Originally Posted by Zenion

Cracking the file open in Notepad++ is... well, exactly as helpful as it sounds, just garbled nonsense. However, the string "OPTPiX iMageStudio 3.0 http://www.webtech.co.jp/" appears repeatedly.

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I had looked at the readable strings in them too, but didn't really think much of that... but it is a good point. Those gW binaries are the only thing that have it under Tetra Master, while PlayOnline has it in the greeting cards (png compressed image files).

Some (128) of the FFXI data files have it as well.

For the Tetra Master files, there are 995 occurrences (might have been fun if was 250 precisely).

I suppose they indeed could be it, but I guess it's starting to get into reverse engineering/data mining territory... which is a little bit off the topic on these here forums. ^^;

Maybe we will never see those cards again :( I really did a deep dive into google and came up with nothing. Doesn't help this game is so obscure that anytime you type "XI" into searches they try to auto correct to XIV. Then, these were all done and shut down before the internet really took off like it is now where everything is archived pretty much.

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Originally Posted by Dragoy

I suppose they indeed could be it, but I guess it's starting to get into reverse engineering/data mining territory... which is a little bit off the topic on these here forums. ^^;

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... why thank you for that helpful hint. So, long story short, I found them. Not going to get into details because that is out of scope here, but it actually isn't as involved as I was afraid. Retrieval is laborious but not difficult.

EDIT: Finished scraping them. Complete gallery is at https://imgur.com/a/fXtiLt7. Sorry for the format, they weren't stored as one big happy sheet so that's not what I got, it's 250 separate images. Couldn't think of anywhere that would let me just upload a zip of them.

Amazing how much detail they got on such tiny images. And that that was high definition graphics when POL was first rolled out.

Very nice!

I had some ideas to try, but didn't get to it yet at all... perhaps some time we'll have a chat about it elseplace.

At least imgur let's one download the whole "post" so that works for that.