The Slack group is still up: http://nfl-blitz-data-editor.slack.com/

But like Jake said, it's been quiet the second half of 2020 and first half of 2021.  Hopefully we pick things back up in the rest of 2021.

Does the demo work on Windows 10?  Do I need a specific version of DirectX?

Sorry, I don't know why I haven't received notifications of these posts.  Let me give you an update and some responses to your questions:

Where I'm at:
With the whole COVID-19 lockdown, work actually got more significant in the business I'm in (software development against health care data).  You can image the amount of demand we're getting right now.  Anyway, where I last left things is trying out modifying the data file and re-export a CHD to MAME.  That failed miserably.  I even tried extracting a CHD and recompressing the CHD only to have it fail as well.  So that testing approach isn't going to work.

Anyway, I'm back to working on the code and so let's pick up with your questions:

1) Thoughts on Blazor/WebWindow
TBH: Not a Blazor fan.  I'm a web developer so I embrace JavaScript to do my client-side development.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't have value as a tool to build desktop apps.  So if you think that it would work for the desktop, I'm fine with that.

2) When building UIs, I do generally come up with some wireframes around what I'm trying to accomplish.  It helps see things first before putting them in code.  That being said, I'm often building complex UIs where this is likely fairly straight forward in what we are trying to accomplish.  Writing out the goals of what the UI is supposed to let the user do would be the first step and then we can mock some things up from there.  Balsamiq is a great mockup tool.

3) PC version vs Arcade version: Are all Blitz Arcade versions similar (ie: Blitz classic, Blitz '99, and Blitz 2000) compared to the PC version?  I would targeting only Blitz 2000 to start with as it's easy to upgrade any arcade to the Blitz 2000 with a couple of chip swaps.  If PC is compatible with Arcade, that would also help there.  Ideally, the way I see NFLBlitzDataEditor.Core would contain readers and writers for specific platforms/version.  This would allow the UI to simply swap between which ones they want use the interfaces to access the methods to read/write.

I have an NFL Blitz classic and need to install the Blitz 2000 upgrade + Flash Drive mod, but I may have to get myself another board so that I can develop and test on the hardware without constantly taking apart my arcade cabinet.

Let me refreshed with the code again and see where we stand.  I remember I was facing a challenge of there being some odd image files mixed around.  Maybe that code with debugger logic in it will help.

I figured out the issue with some images not being extracted properly.  So the UInt32 value stored prior to the format appears to be a version number.  When the value is 2, the image data comes immediately after the header.  When the value is 3, the image data is offset by 2,560 bytes.  I'm not sure why it's 2,560 bytes. 

One thing that I saw while trying to build the image processing code was that the images are padded at the end.  Each image block (start of image to end of image + padding) is a data block that is evenly dividable by 512.  I'm wondering if the reason to add the padding in there is to move past a boundary and ensure that the image doesn't pick up any artifacts.  Not sure, but it looks like those trouble images are extracting properly now.

Jaker, how did you get those offsets?  Are you using the NFL Blitz Gold CHD or the NFL Blitz Classic CHD?  I'm using NFL Blitz 2000 (Gold?) and not seeing how you got that.

Searching for ARHLML.WMS seems to find only 1 match in a list of WMS records (starts at offset 91337612).  Those records appear to be 48 bytes long and none of the values in the ARHLML.WMS seem to match what you got there.

Right now, I'm just finding images based on the occurrence of 0x05800000 to start of the record.  I don't know what image files they map to, although some of the one's I outputted match the offsets you've posted.

There's also WMS file records that are 44 blocks wide starting at position 0x056C0F2C.  But those pointers don't seem to match anything.

Creating this new topic from the original topic "Can't figure out how to update arcade Blitz" - http://nflblitzfans.com/index.php?topic=574.0

So Jaker3... The extraction of images seems to moving along and I made a shocking discovery: blitz2k.chd contains NBA Jam images...

Yes, one of the values is mipmap level.  It's the 7th uin32.  The values are 0 (no mipmapping), 2, 4, 8. 

8 is what you will see in all of the LOD (level of details) images used for the uniforms (like CHIHLOD.WMS) or the banner page (BANPAGE.WMS).

The Ads only use 2 levels (ADS_D.WMS).

Looking at all the actual images, this makes sense.

I also found another file format: 0x0b == RGBA1555.  Basically colors are 5 bit channels, and alpha is 1 bit.