G-Police by Psygnosis (PS1/PC)

[loud kiln]

Probably my favorite game when I was a kid. I always wanted to extract assets from it and also from WipEout. I eventually managed to unpack and convert WipEout models thanks to help from a friend, however with G-Police I was never able to get anything really useful from the unpacked files. I was able to get 20k+ of variously sized files (or possibly file chunks) from the archive, but was able to identify only few of them as splash and menu background textures. I couldn't identify any models or textures. Here is a topic I had about this on Zentax forums:
https://forum.xen-tax.com/viewtopic.php@p=181518.html
Since then I was able to get some textures via No$PSX VRAM viewer, however I have had no progress when it comes to getting models. Any advice what I could try would be welcome. I am currently considering trying to get the emulated game run in wireframe and then just replicating the models by hand with help of reverse projection - they are PS1 models, so only something like 100 triangles per vehicle at most. Alternatively, maybe it would be possible to dump the rendered scene from one of the newer PS1 emulators? It did not seem possible with the emulators avaiable at the time I was trying it before.

[shy parrot]

First aid: try PSXPrev
If no dice: Avocado emulator to rip the scene
If that fails, let me know what kind of files are in the ISO filesystem

[loud kiln]

Avocado was not available when I was trying it last time. I tried dumping the scene from Avocado and while it is mangled, it seems I should be able to eventually piece at least some of the models together from multiple captures (among other things it seems the game has backface culling that cannot by disabled by Avocado).

[shy parrot]

Dang

Didya try psxprev?

[loud kiln]

PSXPrev unfortunately appears to produce only garbage data when scanning the game's ISO 😦

from what I see, PSXPrev is not interpreting the data correctly, because after unpacking the files, I am able to successfully open some files, such as the splash screen

[shy parrot]

not a fault of psxprev really, just looks like the game uses TIM files for some of its textures, but doesn't use TMD for its models

ah well

[loud kiln]

I am not sure the textures are actually TIMs, the splash screen is not TIM, it is raw bitmap unless I am mistaken

at any rate, WipEout did use TIM (I think, one of usual PS1 formats anyway) textures, but used weird custom model format, which the devs at Psygnosis presumably created from scratch

[shy parrot]

Hmmh

[shy parrot]

Well, this is a Tim, guaranteed

But the other textures might be something else. Cracking textures isn't hard more often than not, and I'm sure we could do it.
Models, on the other hand, they're hard yeah

[loud kiln]

I can get textures (with correct palettes) from avocado dump, so not much point trying to extract them

[loud kiln]

well, for one the game (as many PS1 games do) subdivides world quads to reduce texture perspective distortion issues - making the dumps even greater pain to work with

also the dump appears distorted, I assume I will need to find correct aspect ratio and XYZ scale

[hazy vigil]

MOD is only for Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. Using the Scan Bin Data option would fix any corrupted data that it finds. Scanning the raw BIN file itself without selecting it would just give you all of that.

Have you tried this yet? https://github.com/scurest/duckstation-3D-Screenshot/

[loud kiln]

@hazy vigilI scanned the bin/iso image of the game, it did not find any usable data

[hazy vigil]

The game likely doesn't use any TMD models inside. The DuckStation 3D Screenshot is way better than the Avocado 3D Screenshot which is broken.

[loud kiln]

I did not try capturing the scene using DuckStation - I just resumed this effort after having it on hold for years, Avocado was the first hit I found for capturing emulated PS1 scenes

[loud kiln]

Duckstation capture gives just about same mess

it does appear to at least be orthogonal/undistorted, which is a plus

[loud kiln]

In case anyone is interested, G-Police uses some sort of resource management/packaging system which either was something really obscure or it was developed in-house. It has a packaged file called "res.rdt" accompanied by "res.rdi" which is some sort of index - there are also very small files "res.rdr" and "res.rdx" which have unclear purpose. Reportedly this packaging system was also used by Overboard! - another game released by Psygnosis in 1997.