Synalyze It! Grammar for Capitalism .SET files
Posted by kelvSYC on 12-2-2020
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It’s been a long time since I have worked with Synalyze It! (and its non-macOS counterpart, Hexinator). In fact, it’s been six years since I last posted on this matter, and back then, the app tended to crash a lot, and my scripting skills were not up to snuff as it relates to some of the more complicated structures that I have been finding, and the feature set for the app was a bit lacking. Six years later, a lot of it has changed, but my scripting skills and the scripting API is still hit-or-miss.
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Synalyze It!/Hexinator Grammars: SANS FOR518 - Mac Forensic Analysis HFS+ & Reference Sheet. OS X - Get Synalyze It! Windows/Linux - Get Hexinator here. HFS+ Volume Header Grammar. HFS+ Catalog File Grammar. HFS+ Attribute File Grammar. Top reasons why people like Synalyze It!: 1. Can decypher the internal structures of many files, such as.zip,.tar and many 'savegame' files 2. Can’t really parse decompressed data while the data is compressed. The true meat-and-potatoes of the SimCity 2000 data is in fact compressed. CNAM chunks may occur at the end of a file, but I have not seen any save that has that. The string in the CNAM chunk appears to be “dirty Pascal string”. Is described as 'You got a binary file and don't know its contents. Or some software creates binary files where you have a specification but don't want to decode them manually' and is an app in the Development category. There are more than 10 alternatives to Synalyze It! For Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and PortableApps.com.
That said, let’s talk about the business simulation game, Capitalism. (Steam, GOG), and its sequels, Capitalism II(Steam, GOG) and Capitalism Lab. It’s addictive, but difficult to play with the full set of rules. These rules are largely put into .SET files that are moddable to a very limited extent.
Essentially, a .SET file is a container format, with each “file” in the format containing tabular data. (Capitalism also has files elsewhere that are single “files” in the same format).
Full credit goes out to this blog post that reverse engineered the Capitalism II game file formats (most of which also applies to the original Capitalism as well).
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Based on that data, I’ve been able to make a first draft of a .SET grammar for Capitalism. However, it does have a few drawbacks in that while it can map out a row of data, the rows themselves are not mapped out, since reading already parsed data (the column header data) is very painful and likely require a different approach.
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This first draft is now available here. It might be a while before I can make it publicly available from the app itself, since I probably want to work on parsing the row data first.