What I'm after here is help to "decode" whatever graphic format these files I refer to as "fake tims". I think it's easier to tell what I know and hope someone can fill in some blanks.

For background, PG takes up only about half of the CD (363 Meg) so space on the disc was not at a premium to the developers. As I understand it, the game also was put out on the PC, so I have a suspicion that whatever these graphics are, it's something that may have been ported directly and a routine to read them was created for the PSX.

The font that I have been able to find is stored as a standard TIM with 4 CLUTs. By shifting from one palette to another, a different set of characters is shown. Pretty nifty way of storing the font, but for whatever reason, the main part of the game doesn't use this font file. For that matter, the font is stored in 9 separate places on the CD, in different resource files.

It seems that each "phase" of the game has its own resource file. From that, and looking at the VRAM I'm pretty confident that I can make one positive identification between one of the graphic files and a visible picture.

• These graphic files aren't standard TIMs. The header info is not even close, but it is pretty consistent across the examples I've found. Also, there isn't the characteristic patterns that you would see when looking at one in a hex viewer.
• The file extension means nothing that I can tell. In PG, there are normal TIM files with the TIM extension as well as some .DAT files that contain a few TIMs lumped together. These files have extensions of TIM, DAT, DA2 and TMM.
• I've tried to use Nana 1.2 to hunt for anything that looks like a picture. None of the standard nor tile modes work. There are some small patterns at the end of some, but they're nothing more than horizontal lines when lined up, indicating a repeating pattern and is probably just a coincidence.
• There is a discernable header on these files. I haven't decided where it stops, but after about 32 bytes, the it's clearly into the pixel data area.