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History of Ragnarok Emulation
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=== Clients aplenty === An important prerequisite to the development of server emulators was the reverse engineering of the Ragnarok Online client, and from all hacking tools that we have seen, this happened very quickly. Various authors figured out quite quickly that the early Ragnarok client could be made to bypass Gravity’s own GRF file and read directly from a folder In the same location as the Ragnarok EXE. This was due to the fact that the EXE itself had an option which could be passed, or the EXE could be "hexed" (edited with a hex editor) and made to load from the data folder first -- there were some clients which existed which by default read from the data folder. Then came deconstruction of the GRF file itself, which is essentially a ZIP file but with extra steps. People competent and understanding of how file formats work, quickly deconstructed the format of the GRF. This was done by going from the assumption that, if all the files for a game are inside a single file, that then, within that file, the binary for other files must also be stored within that file, and there also must be a header, which describes which files are stored where in the file, and at which position. The common source of this information was provided by a person with the name of "The Raven", who detailed the header format for the GRF files. At the time, even in 2002 before emulators had made an appearance in any major way, there was GrfWiz created by ArtForz and grfextractor written by wdb. These proved to be crucial in being able to extract the contents of GRF files and then either recreate the GRF files, or create data folders which were used to override the contents of the GRF. The most crucial among these was overriding the sclientinfo.xml or clientinfo.xml file, which contained the XML structure which detailed the IP address of the server to connect to, the name of the servers, IDs of GM users, and so on. With these then overridden, this meant that writing a server emulator and being able to test it became possible.
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