Ripping Rayman 1 backgrounds

[sos440]

I know that this is probably an out-dated topic, but I decided to post it because I was unable to find any posting that explain how background images are packed in.

My starting point was this excellent thread, where people discovered that

• background images are packed in VIGNET.DAT, and
• at least one of them are encoded in PCX format.

Pondering upon this observation for a couple of hours, I realized that VIGNET.DAT indeed consists of PCX files in a bit of twisted way: each file is encoded by XOR operation.

I am still working to figure out which byte should be used for the encryption (because the key byte is different for each image), but at least we know how to decode them manually. Here are some ripped images:





Now the point is that, since we are beginning to understand how images are packed in, we will be able to modify them as well. Probably this is a good news for those who want to make a fangame.

[Raymanni]

Looks good! I know there was an old topic where people ripped sprites and backgrounds from R1 but I don't know what happened to it.

[Master]

There's a link to it in the forum index: viewtopic.php?p=298776#p298776
Though looking at some of the links, it seems that some items are missing now. Might be wise to move what we have to be safe.

[RibShark]

Nice! This is great! Trouble is it's hard to find where one PCX begins and another ends. The game must have this information alongside the XOR byte somewhere, so it's only a matter of finding it.

[sos440]

I still can't figure out how the encryption byte is determined. I have some evidence that the game system also checks the 8-bit checksum.

Putting the technicality aside, I wrote a simple code that detect the PCX header pattern and used this to rip all the images inside.

Download

This contains ripped images from VIGNET.DAT for the following versions:

Rayman 1
Rayman Forever
Rayman Designer
Rayman Learning Center

Most images are seen during the gameplay, but I guess some are never seen before (such as a certificate in Chinese, which is not very interesting though...).