Cover Girl Strip Poker Text

Cover Girl Strip Poker Text

Format type	Text
Text purpose	Story
Line endings	None
Character set	DOS-865 (Nordic)
Games	Cover Girl Strip Poker

The text inside the game Cover Girl Strip Poker is stored in a compressed format, and contains entries which have to be read in sequential order. It has a separate file for each language, and an additional file contains the looping credits shown on the game's title screen.

The actual way the game determines which entry to use is unknown; entries starting with an asterisk seem to imply section divisions, but it is unknown whether the text in these section names is interpreted, or if the game simply uses entry indices for accessing specific lines. Some parts use ini-like semicolons for prefixing comments as well, though these always seem to be behind asterisk-lines.

The files are:

Name	Description
FRENCH.PPP	French strings.
GERMAN.PPP	German strings.
ENGLISH.PPP	English strings.
ITALIAN.PPP	Italian strings.
SCROLL.PPP	Game credits looping on the game's main title page.

File format

The file is compressed with a flag-based RLE. After decompression, it follows a structure where every string is prefixed by a byte indicating its length. Finally, the strings themselves are "encrypted" by applying a circular bit shift.

All comments in the text appear to be made in Danish, with occasional accented characters in it. Because of this, the files should be interpreted with the Nordic DOS-865 character set.

Compression

Like all .PPP files, the file is compressed with a flag-based run-length encoding algorithm. This is described on the Nova Format page. The file should be uncompressed before being interpreted.

Format

The strings are repeating blocks of the following structure:

Data type	Name	Description
BYTE	Length	Length of the following string
BYTE[Length]	String	String value, encrypted with circular bit shift.

Encryption

The strings are "encrypted" by applying a circular bit shift, where each string is right-shifted by one bit. To reconstruct the text, apply a circular shift that shifts the value one bit to the left.

Example

A portion of the decrypted ENGLISH.PPP, shown as one entry per line:

*******************************
* Num lock
*******************************
Turn Numlock on
*************************
*      Hand start	*
*************************
Okay handsome ... here's the deal.
YOUR five cards ... from me to you.
The cards are out ... what's it gonna be?
*************************
*	Girl bets	*
*************************
I bet
*************************
*	Girl Change	*
*************************
I change
cards.
card.
*************************
*	Girl calls	*
*************************
I call.
*************************
*	Girl drops	*
*************************
You are too good. I give up.
*************************
*      Girl raises	*
*************************
I raise
*************************	;pigen har vundet en enkelt haand
*	Girl wins	*
*************************
I won.
************************* ;spilleren er falit. pigen har vundet hele spillet
*     Girl won all	*
*************************
I have got the money AND my clothes...YOU on the other hand, will catch a cold if you don't get your clothes on.
As I always say...it's a GREAT game with a GREAT prize to win.
Was it as good for you as it was for me? ... Let's play it again.

Code

This code will decode a single string from the decompressed data dump:

for (i = 0; i < text_size; i++) {
  // STRIP.EXE:00009218: rol al, 1
  text_data[i] = ((text_data[i] << 1) | (text_data[i] >> 7));
}

Tools

The following tools are able to work with files in this format.

Name	Platform	View?	Modify?	Access hidden data?	Edit metadata?	Notes
Westwood Strings Editor	Windows	Yes	Yes	N/A	N/A