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digital-preservation / PRONOM_Research

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Superstarreader pdg format (new) #57

Open eroux opened 6 months ago

eroux commented 6 months ago

Thank you for choosing to submit a new entry to PRONOM. For each submission, please include as much of the following information as possible. It's okay if you don't have everything, but please include what you can.

Format name

SuperStar Reader (SSReader)

Extensions

.pdg

MIME/Media Type n/a

Description SuperStar Reader (SSReader) PDG format. Relatively obscure format used mostly in the PRC in the 2000s.

Format type Graphics

Vendor No known currently active vendor supports it, SuperStar Reader was the historical creator of the format. See https://groups.google.com/g/chinesemac/c/DyLRLYCU2uE/m/40u946owBJsJ for some historical information. The website of the software company seems down but there are snapshots on Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20050205011333/http://www.ssreader.com/

File format identification signatures

There is an example pdg file in the following archive if anyone wants to derive the signature:

000004.zip

I've had some success converting it to jpeg with Pdg2Pic some years ago (I can't find the result anymore though). I can't remember where I got Pdg2Pic but I still have a copy of the Windows exe if anyone wants to try it.

You can credit "Buddhist Digital Resource Center" as the source

tnafrancesca commented 4 months ago

Hello,

I think I can spot quite a nice signature for this file format, I was wondering though if you may have other file samples I could look at to verify the signature? Or if they aren't sharable would it be possible to provide a signature to run over these files?

The signature I have is an offset of 64 followed by 'SUPER STAR SSREADER' but it would be great to verify this. I can try to hunt around for more samples if you don't have any!

Best wishes, Francesca

eroux commented 4 months ago

Hello Francesca, thanks for your answer! This signature is quite promising indeed :)

Here's another pdg file from another batch:

001225.zip

I don't have that many folders of these files (and I suspect they have have the same signature in a folder)

Best

thorsted commented 4 months ago

Hi, did some initial research.

Current reader here.

According to the original page for Pdg2Pic there are a few versions of the PDG format.

It seems the 16th byte is the version byte for PDG files. I will see if I can find more examples.

And some more with a slightly different header. Also more.

Here is a modern use of the PDG2pic process to make PDF's.

eroux commented 4 months ago

thanks for your investigation!