Download/Install

Screenshots

Functionality/Use

This tool provides a means to look at the internals of an Asheron's Call DAT file.

• The AC:DM version only works with portal.dat.
• The AC:TOD version only works with client_portal.dat, client_highres.dat, and client_local_English.dat.

It categorizes the DAT file entries into the known categories. You can view images internal to the DAT file, play sounds, and view text. By default the program will determine the location of your and initial DAT file from the Asheron's Call registry entries, and load that file on startup.

• The AC:DM starts with portal.dat.
• The AC:TOD starts with client_portal.dat.

The program is capable of being used to view other DAT files on your system (see below). It can only view one DAT file at a time (I realize that for AC:TOD the 3 files really merge together when AC:TOD is running, and in the future I may allow for a merged view of files - this way indexed images inside the client_highres.dat file can see their palettes in the client_portal.dat, but at this time this is not supported).

A majority of this program and my interest in writing it is owed to the pioneering efforts of Todd Berkebile, David Simpson, and Cibo Matto. You can also thank the folks who were on #acdev that fateful night when they convinced me to even post this on the web. And so I therefore donate this program to the ACDev community. Long may they all rock the boat.

It's usage is pretty straightforward. If you know how to understand the left/right seek/view paradigm used by Windows Explorer, you should be able to figure it out pretty easily. However, here's a quick rundown:

Default	Use this button to reload the default DAT file as determined by your Asheron's Call registry entries.
Open	Use this button to load in a DAT file stored elsewhere on your system.
Save	Used to save off either your currently selected DAT objects (multiple selections only in the AC:TOD version) or a selected branch (AC:DM version only since AC:TOD version doesn't use a tree) in the DAT file to a location of your choosing. Files will be named after their DAT file ID with and extension appropriate to its type. For example in the above image, the user is viewing Portal.DAT object 06000261 which is a 512x512 24-bit color image. Using save will create the file 06000261.bmp in the location of your choosing. Images are saved as color BMP files (grayscale toggle doesn't affect this), sounds are saved as WAV files, and text is saved in TXT files. All other files are saved as raw byte files with a BIN extension (AC:TOD version only).
Toggle Grayscale	Use this button to toggle the image display state between Color and Greyscale/Grayscale.