akitext - Text Archive Handler for AKI Corporation's Nintendo 64 games

akitext is a text archive handler for AKI Corporation's Nintendo 64 games.

Usage

Running akitext without any arguments will print the program usage.

• Extract strings: akitext -e AKITEXT_FILE
• Build text archive: akitext -b INPUT_FILE

Optional Arguments

-o OUTFILE        Set output filename (works in both modes)
-q                Enable quiet mode (only show error and success messages)
-i                (decomp matching) Ignore last NULL
-p NUM_ENTRIES    (decomp matching) Pad offset table to NUM_ENTRIES

Ignore last NULL

Some AKIText archives don't end with a 0x00 byte for the last string. If -i is set, replicate this behavior.

(todo: This may require string to be on a uint16_t boundary...)

Pad offset table

Some AKIText archives have an offset table with more entries than the number of actual strings in the table. If -p is set and greater than 0, pad the offset table to the specified number of entries with 0x0000 values.

Format Information

Offset list starts at file offset 0. Each entry is two bytes, little endian.

The first offset value is essentially the length of the offset table.

Strings are either in ASCII or Shift-JIS encoding. This program makes no attempt to convert characters to any specific encoding, and expects non-ASCII characters to use Shift-JIS encoding (or certain internal codepoints that need to be documented).

Text archives may or may not have a maximum length. The Edit Mode move names are split every 512 strings, but there are archives in WWF No Mercy with well over 512 strings, and they seem to work fine. If there is a maximum length, it may be game-specific.

License

This program is licensed under the Unlicense. See the UNLICENSE file for more information.