Packed Animation File

• Extension: paf
• Company: Amazing Studio
• Samples: http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/game-formats/hod-paf/ (hod1-partial.paf)

Packed Animation File (PAF) is a movie used in the Windows version of the game Heart Of Darkness. The source code for a reverse engineered decoder is available at: http://cyxdown.free.fr/pafdec

There is also a PlayStation version of this game. It is unknown if that version uses this file format for FMV. Many PS1 games used the PlayStation Motion Decoder format for their FMV.

Archive Format

The Windows version of Heart Of Darkness contains a large data file called hod.paf. This file contains 25 PAF files concatenated together and prepended by a header. The header is 100 bytes long and consists of 25 little endian 32-bit numbers which are absolute offsets into the archive file. For example, bytes 0-3 contain the number 0x000000C8 = 100 which indicates that the first file occurs immediately following the 100-byte header.

File Format

A PAF file consists of a header and a series of interleaved audio and video data. The video data is stored with a custom paletted video encoding method. The audio is stored

All multi-byte numbers are stored in little endian format.

bytes 0-55     signature
bytes 56-127   unknown; might be unused bytes for the signature block
bytes 132-135  frame count
bytes 140-143  video width
bytes 144-147  video height
bytes 152-155  read buffer size
bytes 156-159  number of frame blocks to preload
bytes 160-163  frame blocks count
bytes 164-167  starting offset of multimedia data
bytes 168-171  max video frames block count
bytes 172-175  max audio frames block count

The 55-byte signature field should contain the string "Packed Animation File V1.0\n(c) 1992-96 Amazing Studio\x0A\x1A".