TETRA MASTER

[Dragoy]

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

[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. 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.

[Dragoy]

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.

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. ^^;

[Zenion]

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. ^^;

... 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.

[Immortal]

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.

[Dragoy]

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.

[Immortal]

Awesome thanks for that, I knew I remembered FF10 ones