Important Files
| PSX Version | PC Version |
|---|---|
| /INIT/KERNEL.BIN | /DATA/KERNEL/KERNEL.BIN |
| /DATA/KERNEL/KERNEL2.BIN |
The KERNEL.BIN Archive
The file KERNEL.BIN archive is in BIN-GZIP format. It consists of 27 gziped sections concatenated together with a 6 byte header for each. This file is the same both on the PC and PSX versions. This holds all the static data and menu text for the game, with a look up table at the beginning of the section. The first 9 sections of data (i.e. The non-text related items) are in typical BIN file archive format. Sections 10-27 are FF Text files. The text sections have a header of pointers at the beginning of each section and point to a text block below.
The KERNEL.BIN file consists of the following sections.
| File | Data | Offset |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Command data | 0x0006 |
| 2 | Attack data | 0x0086 |
| 3 | Battle and growth data | 0x063A |
| 4 | Initialization data | 0x0F7F |
| 5 | Item data | 0x111B |
| 6 | Weapon data | 0x137A |
| 7 | Armor data | 0x1A30 |
| 8 | Accessory data | 0x1B73 |
| 9 | Materia data | 0x1C11 |
| 10 | Command descriptions | 0x1F32 |
| 11 | Magic descriptions | 0x2199 |
| 12 | Item descriptions | 0x28D4 |
| 13 | Weapon descriptions | 0x2EE2 |
| 14 | Armor descriptions | 0x307B |
| 15 | Accessory descriptions | 0x315F |
| 16 | Materia descriptions | 0x3384 |
| 17 | Key Item descriptions | 0x3838 |
| 18 | Command Names | 0x3BE2 |
| 19 | Magic Names | 0x3CCA |
| 20 | Item Names | 0x4293 |
| 21 | Weapon Names | 0x4651 |
| 22 | Armor Names | 0x4B02 |
| 23 | Accessory Names | 0x4C4B |
| 24 | Materia Names | 0x4D90 |
| 25 | Key Item Names | 0x5040 |
| 26 | Battle and Battle-Screen Text | 0x5217 |
| 27 | Summon Attack Names | 0x5692 |
The KERNEL2.BIN Archive
On the PC version there exists a secondary kernel archive called KERNEL2.BIN. This archive contains only sections 10-27 (Text data) of KERNEL.BIN. The data was ungzipped from the original archive, concatenated together, and then LZSed into a single archive with a 4 byte header giving the length of the file.
The maximum allotted storage space on the PC version for all un-LZSed data in the kernel2.bin is 27KB (27648 bytes). This means that the total size of the extracted files (text and pointers) must be less than this.