GOD OF WAR BACKUP TUTORIAL
Tools needed:
- DVD Decrypter
- Apache2
- God Of War Tool v1.00
NOTES:
In order to make a working DVD5 backup of this game you will need a lot of hard drive space (approx 20gig). You will also need to use a PC that has the NTFS file system not FAT32 as the files are larger than 2gig. Windows 95/98 users will no doubt have problems. This guide is presuming you are using Windows XP with enough space.
First, use DVD Decrypter and create an ISO from the original game disk.
Once that is complete, create a new folder on your hard drive called “God”.
Open the ISO in Apache2, right-click the volume label and select ‘Extract All’ from the pop-up menu:
Browse to the ‘God’ folder you created and click ok. It will take a little while for all files to be extracted.
Once the file extraction is complete, right-click the volume label again, but this time select ‘Switch Layers’ from the menu:
You should now see Layer1 in the Apache2 window, and it contains only 1 file called PART2.PAK.
Right-click the volume label for the last time, and again select ‘Extract All’ from the menu. Browse to the same ‘God’ folder and click OK.
Once all the extracting is complete, take a look in your ‘God’ directory and it should be the same as the above picture. Once you’ve confirmed that you have a 7.93GIG ‘God’ directory you can continue.
Close Apache2 and open ‘GodOfWar.exe’. Click the browse button and browse to your ‘God’ folder to select the GODOFWAR.TOC file. Click OK.
Now hit the ‘Extract’ button and the tool will begin the extraction process which will take a little while.
Once all the files have been extracted you should see a new directory in the ‘God’ folder called ‘Extracted’. If you check the ‘Extracted’ folder it should contain 955 files and should be 7.12Gig in size.
You may notice that the 2 original PAK files from the game total 7.93Gig in size yet only 7.12Gig has been extracted – this is not an error, the original PAK files have duplicate files in each, probably to prevent over excessive layer switching.
Downsizing the game
There is probably more than one way to downsize the game – maybe if you resample the movie files it can be downsized with all content remaining, I can’t confirm or deny this as I haven’t tried it. If you are going to attempt downsizing yourself please make sure that the final size of the rebuilt file is less than 4,294,967,295 bytes (4096MB).
For this tutorial I’m taking the simpler option – removing the bonus content. Select all the *.PSS files that contain the word BONUS and delete them:
Next, sort the folder by TYPE:
All the *.PSW files will be listed together so it makes it easier to select them all – then delete them.
The *.PSW files are the same video files as the *.PSS files so you are not loosing anything here.
Once you’ve deleted all the necessary files we can move onto the rebuilding stage.
Once again, open up the tool GodOfWar.exe, browse to the GOD folder and select the
‘GODOFWAR.TOC’ – but this time click the ‘Rebuild’ button.
Sit back and relax while the tool rebuilds the files.
Once it’s finished rebuilding you will be presented with the EasyRelink screen:
All the files on the right side list are the ones the tool has just added to our new file. The list on the left represents all the files we deleted – as you have probably noticed, it lists files we didn’t actually delete! It’s ok – these are the duplicate files I talked about earlier. Click the ‘Auto Relink Dupes’ button and that will take care of relinking the duplicate files for us.
Now all that should remain are the *.PSW files and the bonus *.PSS files that were deleted.
The rest of the relinking process has to be done manually so from the left side list select the first file (‘A01MP01.PSW’) and search for the same file but with a PSS extension on the right sided list, once you’ve found it (‘A01MP01.PSS’) select it and then press the ‘Relink’ button. Do the same for all the remaining PSW files. For the bonus PSS files you can choose any pss file on the right side list to relink them all too.
As you relink each file the list on the left should get smaller... continue until all files have been relinked.
Once all the relinking is done you should see the following:
Click the OK button and close the GodOfWar.exe tool.
Go to your ‘God’ directory in explorer and you should see the following:
Time to tidy up before making the new ISO.
Delete the ‘Extracted’ folder and delete the following files:
- PART1.PAK
- PART2.PAK
- GODOFWAR.TOC
Rename GODOFWAR.TOC_NEW to GODOFWAR.TOC
Rename PART1.PAK_NEW to PART1.PAK
Check your ‘God’ folder. It should now contain 3.47Gig of data. If it doesn’t either something went wrong or you may have missed a stage. If it does then it’s time to create the ISO.
Included with this tutorial should be 2 files called ‘GodOfWar.iml’ and ‘GodOfWar.ims’. Place these two files into your ‘God’ directory.
Open Apache2 and select File -> Import IML File from the menu.
Browse to your ‘God’ directory and select the ‘GodOfWar.iml’ file. Apache will open the file and you will see it’s layout. Now, go to File -> Build ISO from the menu, browse to where you would like Apache2 to save your new ISO, give it a name, press ok and sit back and wait.
Once Apache2 has completed creating the ISO you will see this message:
Check your newly created iso and it should be 3.47Gig in size.
Use your favourite burning program to burn the iso to dvd5.
You now have a working DVD5 backup of this great game!
