Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (PlayStation)

This page contains notes for the game Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (PlayStation).

The Harry Potter PlayStation games share similar data formats (with adaptations/exceptions) to other Argonaut Games projects.

POTTER.DAT and POTTER.DIR files#

POTTER.DAT is an uncompressed structure that contains data for files used by the game. POTTER.DIR is a companion directory that lists the name, position, and length of every stored file.

• DATDIR-Codec can unpack, re/pack, and probe these files.

WAD files#

WAD files are self-contained game scenes (menus and levels), encompassing all required assets. They are split into sections.

• PS1-Argonaut-Reverse contains a Python script that can be used to export data from WAD files in common, usable formats.
• WAD-Crosser can split and merge these files from/into their sections.

Sections#

List of WAD files#

Name format#

WAD file/scene names follow a format logically devised for use in the Croc 2 game: TxLyMzzz.WAD.

• x: the Tribe the scene belongs to - more or less irrelevant to the HP PS games.
• y: the Level the scene belongs to - the HP PS games seem to use this loosely to associate scenes, with some oddities.
  • 0: appears to be used for tests/menus.
  • 1: Lower Castle scenes.
  • 2: Castle Grounds scenes (including the 3 non-Quidditch League games of Quidditch).
  • 3: Dungeons scenes (as well as the Great Hall (Lower Castle) and Quidditch Training (Castle Grounds)).
  • 4: Upper Castle scenes.
  • (No Level 5 scenes exist, for some reason.)
  • 6: Diagon Alley/shops and Forbidden Forest scenes.
  • 7: Gringotts scenes.
  • 8: Miscellaneous secret challenge scenes (and story gameplay, if lumped into the same map(s)).
  • 9: Quidditch League scenes.
• zzz: the Map the scene represents - each is its own level in real terms.

Encoded Strings#

To do: Real locations of strings within files within unpacked DAT/DIR structure.

POTTER.DAT contains most of the game data, and a large amount of strings for the game. Starting towards the top of the POTTER.DAT file, there are a large group of strings like the following:

Sbgnnk Rdbnqc Thld:
C`khaq`sd Cnmsqnkkdq
Lnnj Mncd
Cdmsdq Sbqddm
@ Cdmsdq Sbqddm

It turns out that these strings are ROT-1 encoded, but only the lowercase letters are. The uppercase letters are left as-is. After decoding, these strings are:

School Record Time:
C`libr`te Controller
Look Mode
Center Screen
@ Center Screen

Further, it looks like all instances of the letter 'a' are replaced with a backtick character (`). That'd make the second line in the example "Calibrate Controller".