Nintendo File Formats

SEAD > Archives (SARC)

This page describes version 0x100 of the file format.

Certain files, such as textures, have specific alignment requirements. For this reason, there may be padding between the SFNT and data section, and between individual files within the data section.

SFAT Section

The hash multiplier is always 101 in official files.

FAT entry

These must be sorted by filename hash, because they are looked up with a binary search algorithm.

Filename Hash

The filename hash is calculated as follows, using the hash multiplier from the SFAT header:

def calculate_hash(filename, multiplier):
    hash = 0
    for byte in filename:
        hash = hash * multiplier + byte
    return hash & 0xFFFFFFFF

In Switch games, each byte of the filename is sign extended. This is important if the filename uses non-ascii characters.

Filename Attributes

Official files almost always contain filenames, even if only one file has a specific hash.

If this field is zero, no filename is stored for the given file. This is only possible if exactly one file has the given hash.

Otherwise, this field is stored as 0xAABBBBBB. For a given hash, AA starts at 1 and is incremented on every FAT entry that has the same hash. In practice, AA is almost always 1 because the probability of hash collisions is quite low. BBBBBB is an offset into the filename table divided by 4.

SFNT Section

This section simply contains an array of filenames. Each filename is a null-terminated string, and must be aligned on 4 bytes.