How I revived the scrapped Lewa Mata level in Bionicle: The Game
If you are reading this you are probably aware of the vast amount of unused content present in the PS2 port of Bionicle: The Game. The majority of the unused archives were relatively easy to get working, but they were mostly just small test areas. However, as many of you know, there is a copy of the scrapped Lewa Mata level in the game’s files. Compared to the rest of the unused content in the game, this level although created early in development, is by far the most complete. I took it upon myself to get this level working, regardless of how long it would take to do so.
Understanding how Bionicle: The Game worked was critical for this scenario. Luckily the game has a relatively simple structure. The root directory consists of three essential files: GAME.DIR, GAME.WAD, and the main .ELF. The GAME.WAD is an archive that stores all of the individual archives used in the game one after the other, and the GAME.DIR contains the pointers and sizes of the archives within the GAME.WAD. Both of these files are loaded by the main .ELF during startup. While the overall structure of the game may be simple, the individual BIGB archives are far more complicated. There are two different extensions used for BIGB archives: .pss, and . psm. The .pss archives can contain characters, small geometry, music, and sound effects. The .psm archives contain large geometry, but no audio whatsoever. The internal structure of the archives is largely the same, regardless of the extension. Here is some very basic information about them: They are all compressed with some variant of Run-length encoding, have a magic number that is 0x04 bytes long (BIGB or BGIB depending on endianness) a WAD version at 0x08, and can contain up to four different chunks.The first chunk contains things like audio headers, textures, and models. The second chunk presumably contains collision data and other parameters. The last two chunks, which are uncompressed, contain the actual audio data that the first chunk references. Luckily the upper half of the file contains most of the information about each chunk.
The first issue I faced when trying to get this level to boot was the different WAD versions. The WAD version is essentially the engine version that the file was built with, and it increments every time the engine is updated. In BIGB and BGIB files, the WAD version is always stored at 0x08 as a single byte. The WAD version stored in the file is also verified by the main .ELF to check if it matches the internal WAD version. This check was most likely implemented to prevent errors during development, since a file built with an older engine build would have issues running on an updated build. Although I am not too familiar with MIPS assembly, the check itself is still fairly straightforward.
Through fixing some of the newer unused levels, I was able to use a simple trick to bypass this check; change the WAD version of the archive so it matches the internal WAD version. However, from my testing I found that the archive’s WAD version must be within the interval 0x70 ≤ x ≤ 0x74 in order for it to load in the final game at all. The main problem with the Lewa Mata level is that the WAD version (0x6F: 111 in base 10) is too different to load successfully with the final internal WAD version (0x74: 116 in base 10), so this trick will not work with the Lewa Mata level archives.
After trying a bunch of different modifications in a futile attempt to get this level to load over the span of a few months, I discovered something strange. When datamining the unreleased Bionicle 2: City of Legends demo (which uses the same engine as Bionicle: The Game), I found that its internal name was “ININJA”.
After a quick Google search, I learned that I-NINJA was another game for the PS2 produced by the same developers and released around the same time as Bionicle: The Game. I was already speculating that certain games used same engine as Bionicle: The Game, such as The Conduit, and Ben 10 - Protector of Earth, but they were all released sometime after. After doing a little more digging, I found that the directory of the symbol file referenced in the executable of the PC port of Bionicle: The Game contained a folder titled “LegoNinja”. The evidence I found strongly suggested that Bionicle: The Game was nothing more than a modified version of I-NINJA at its core. With this newfound knowledge, I decided to check the WAD version of I-NINJA, which actually turned out to be greater than the one used in Bionicle: The Game. However, the development of I-NINJA must have started before or at the same time as Bionicle: The Game given the evidence I found. Eventually, it was brought to my attention that a demo for I-NINJA existed. The demo was part of a demo disc produced by Namco, and was named “Namco Transmission v1.03”. These “Transmission” discs were bundled with certain games and contained demos of upcoming titles. This particular demo was bundled with Soulcalibur II. It turns out the WAD version used in the I-NINJA demo was 0x6F, an exact match to the Lewa Mata level’s WAD version. The next step was actually getting the files to load up in the demo. To do that, the demo of I-NINJA would need to have a hidden level select present in the files, like Bionicle: The Game. Luckily, unlike the final game, the demo version of I-NINJA had a level select archive, which happened to have the same name as the level select archive in Bionicle: The Game (9-97).
After getting the level select to load up on boot, I started working on porting the Lewa Mata level archives over. First I needed to figure out which archive was the character archive. The process of doing so was fairly easy, since I already had the texture format reverse engineered. After replacing the character archive, I replaced the two level archives. In this scenario, the level that needed to be replaced was arbitrary. Finally, I repacked the whole demo and tried to load up the level. The final issue I faced was a black screen. Although the level would load, bad post-processing layers made it impossible to see anything. I’m speculating that this is because the level itself was never intended to be played on retail hardware, and was built for use with a development kit or development device. After researching PS2 graphics processing, I discovered that a hardware hack existed that could potentially remove the post-processing effects causing the black screen. After a few attempts, the level was finally visible.
Of course during this process I learned that Lewa Mata did not exist within the character archive for his level, despite his picture being present in the hud. My theory is that at one point during development, you would seek out Lewa as Gali, and switch to controlling Lewa once you found him, similar to their meetup in the final game.
Unfortunately, given that a hardware hack is needed to see anything, this will NOT work on a retail PS2 console. Hopefully a little more reverse engineering will fix that soon :)
Anyways, if you made it this far, thanks for reading this post.
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