I'm trying to extract models and textures from Front Mission 4, an unencrypted PS2 game and due to my inexperience and inability to found detailed information have hit a brick wall- I have no idea what models, textures, and UVs "look" like within hexadecimal format. While I'm pretty sure there is not a uniform format I need someone to tell me what I'm supposed to be looking for.
Data layouts differ depending on what platform they're designed for. Considering it's the ps2, vertices are most commonly stored in regular floating point format (
http://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatConverter/IEEE754.html) though the ps2 is little endian so you need to swap the value around.
For example: 1.0 in hexidecimal is 0x3F800000 but in little endian it'd be 0x000803F.
As far as textures go, the ps2 preferably uses palettized images due to little video ram, so you basically have an array of 4 byte RGBA values and then indices into that array.
The ps2 likes to upload data directly to the respective registers through the use of commands. (
http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?p=52244#p52244)
As far as difficulty goes, I'd say the ps2 is a lot more difficult to deal with than more recent platforms due to heavy platform optimisation.
If you have some kind of idea of what you're doing, I'd recommend finding yourself a copy of the ps2 sdk somewhere on the internet and reading up on the documentation of the system and it's pipelines.
Thank you, this is a good start.