DMY.DAT - developer fixtures Confirmed
Nothing you see, hear or do in Legend of Legaia comes from this file. DMY.DAT sits beside PROT.DAT at the disc root and its name suggests “dummy data” or a second asset bank - but what is inside is developer test fixtures, shipped on the retail disc and never loaded by the game. It matters for one reason: it is the disc's spare room, and the patcher uses it.
At a glance
- In the game
- Never. No retail code path opens the file.
- Magic / marker
- None - a small offset table at the start, then fixtures.
- Lives in
- Disc root, next to
PROT.DAT: 18,054 Form 1 sectors at the end of the disc (LBA 180228 on the USA image). - Parser
- None needed;
crates/protwalks its TOC, the categorize pipeline skips its contents. Patcher side:legaia_patcher::disc::DiscPatcher::annex_blob. - Confidence
- Confirmed - no reference to the file exists in
SCUS_942.54or any overlay, and the fixture patterns are visible in the bytes.
Contents
Three discernable patterns:
- A memory-bus test pattern (alternating bit-walk values used to validate RAM during development).
- Paired random blobs (used as test inputs for the audio / video pipelines).
- A small offset table at the start.
No part of the file is referenced by retail gameplay code; the file is included on disc but never loaded. This is one of the few “dead” claims in the project that rests on no reference existing rather than on “no static caller” - see the address reference scan for the difference.
Treatment
Skipped by the categorize pipeline (the sweep that classifies every archive entry by format). Not interesting for either preservation or the engine port - but knowing it is inert saves anyone else from digging through it, and it keeps the pochi-fill slots company as the disc's other developer-placeholder pattern.
The DMY.DAT annex - spare room for patched discs
Because nothing reads it, DMY.DAT is the largest stretch of the disc a patch can overwrite without breaking anything. The patcher's equipment editor uses it when a rebuilt player battle file outgrows its PROT.DAT slot - a weapon model transplanted into another character's file, or the Super Arts Pack's animation block.
The file's first 0x8000 bytes (header, record[0], descriptor table) stay in the PROT entry; the grown slot region is parked here, with the descriptor offsets pointing into DMY.DAT. The retail loader streams by offset from the entry's start LBA and never bounds a file by its TOC span, so it follows the offsets across without modification.
- A bump-allocator marker (
LGAX, version, sectors used) in the file's last sector records what an earlier patch already placed, so a second patch of the same disc allocates past the first. - The first sector (its own offset table) is left alone so the archive still parses.
- The image keeps its size, so a PPF carries the annex.