Is there a way to decompress packaged assets

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#1

Hi,
is ther any way to decompress the pda and pdi formats?
Iv been playing with a bunch of games from itch and came accros this one thats like a sound board

they mention that you cant add ur own sounds so i saw that as a challenge.
Grabbed some pda files from our tapeworm game and replaced them with ones in theres and it worked great, now i have a soundboard app with tapeworm and flea sounds

I wonder what the modding / hacking scene will be on playdate

I would love to do some custom sprite work on some of these games and especially on this sounds board app.

I would also like to see how some people pack there sprites etc. could be really interesting to inspect some more complex examples.

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#2

YES, modding is possible but is easier if a game is written with it in mind. Sadly Audio Plywood is not currently written in that way.

The SDK provides ability to put additional assets in the Data Directory (outside of the pdx) and then if the game uses playdate.file commands to look for assets and load them it will pick them from the Data Directory before the pdx: https://sdk.play.date/inside-playdate/#f-file.open
I do this with cars, stages, etc in Daily Driver as I want the game to be modable. You can replace sounds, images, animations. You could even allow Lua code to be added to the Data Directory so people could write custom behaviours! The sky is the limit.

For games that are not written to look in the Data Directory for additional assets, you will need to reverse engineer the pdi or write a tool to convert them back to PNG/GIF, using the following information as a guide:
https://github.com/jaames/playdate-reverse-engineering and then place those in the pdx as you have done.

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#3

Totally feel free to hack on Audio Plywood. (Dev here. Hello! And thanks for downloading and playing around with it. And ... I don't know ... “be sure to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE” or whatever the influencers say these days.)

What you see now is the first milestone of the app. The next milestone, Coming Soon™ (I have a demanding day job plus it's summer, so I can't commit to a specific timeline) will let you supply a custom package of sounds and icons as a fourth page of the sound board. That will definitely make customization easier.

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