Black & White 2

Static recompilation of Black & White 2 (Lionhead Studios / Electronic Arts, 2005) from its shipping Win32 binary to native C.

Built on the pcrecomp toolchain, and directly on bw — the same studio's engine, four years on.

Project Status: P0 partial. The target binary is on a later disc and has not been extracted yet.

Nothing has been lifted, and nothing builds or runs. What is here is this write-up and the P0 output in analysis/. The game is 32-bit PE (MSVC 7.1), so it goes through pcrecomp's 32-bit path, not the x86-64 one.

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What P0 found

Four discs, data1.hdr + data1.cab + data2.cab per disc — InstallShield version 9.

The installer header is authoritative about what it holds, and what it says is the headline:

 893      C      21739061      19605290   white.exe

white.exe is 21,739,061 bytes. That is the largest binary this toolchain has ever been pointed at, by a distance:

Binary	Size	Status
white.exe (B&W2, 2005)	21.74 MB	not yet extracted
Rise of Legends (2006)	13.25 MB	"the stress test"
Encarta 97 ENC97.EXE + 5 DLLs	~7 MB total	runs
Black & White (2001)	~5 MB	active, 569 types done

white.exe lives at file index 893, and disc 1's cabinets only carry indices 0–103. It is on disc 2, 3 or 4 and pulling it means walking a four-disc multi-volume InstallShield set. That is the next thing to do here and it has not been done.

What did come off disc 1, byte-exact:

Binary	Size	.text	Built	Role
Black & White 2_code.exe	323,584	134,068	2005-08-19	launcher / config
binkw32.dll	339,456	—	2005-03-03	Bink video (88 exports)
DrvMgt.dll	41,472	—	2005-02-16	SafeDisc driver manager

MSVC 7.1 (Visual Studio .NET 2003). The launcher is clean — entropy 1.17–6.64, no wrapper sections.

DrvMgt.dll plus 00000001.TMP and 00000002.TMP in the disc root is the SafeDisc signature. Whether it wraps white.exe itself is unknown until white.exe is in hand; Black & White 2_code.exe is not wrapped, and on OMF: Battlegrounds the same disc-level markers turned out to cover only the 53 KB launcher and none of the 4.5 MB of engine. Do not assume either way.

Why bother, given bw exists

The first Black & White is the most C++-heavy project in the collection and it is what forced the whole of tools/cpp/ into existence — MSVC and Metrowerks mangling in both directions, vtable parsing, a seven-level class hierarchy (Base → GameThing → Object → Mobile → Living…) and a 135 KB CreatureMental struct. All 569 types are done.

Black & White 2 is that engine four years and one compiler generation later. Every type name recovered by hand for bw is a hypothesis to test against this binary, and where they still match, that is 569 types of head start on a 21 MB image. Where they do not, the diff is the four years.

It is also the honest answer to "can this toolchain handle a 2005 AAA title". Rise of Legends says not yet — 25,513 functions reachable only through vtables, no RTTI, and the conclusion at the time was that a real vtable scanner had to be ported from xboxrecomp first. That port has since landed as tools/cpp/vtable_scan.py (100% of findable vtables on Trespasser, checked against its RTTI), next to tools/cpp/rtti.py. Measuring them changed the conclusion: on Trespasser and Force Commander both, RTTI and vtable scanning added names, not functions; the disassembler's E9 seeding and fixpoint were already finding the methods. So for B&W2 they are the way to put bw's class names onto a 21 MB image, not a gate in front of disassembling it.

Where it goes next

1. Unpack discs 2–4 and extract white.exe. Nothing else can start.
2. tools/disasm/disasm32.py over it, then tools/cpp/rtti.py (if it kept its RTTI) and tools/cpp/vtable_scan.py for names. See CONSOLIDATION.md for what they do and do not find.
3. Run bw's recovered type names against the new binary and measure what survived.

Layout

bw2/
  original/   four discs (.bin/.cue, and bw2d1.iso converted from disc 1)
  disc/       disc 1's installer cabinets
  game/       what has been extracted so far
  analysis/
  docs/

Credits

Black & White 2 © 2005 Lionhead Studios / Electronic Arts. This project neither contains nor distributes any part of it.

The code and documentation here are MIT; LICENSE spells out that the grant stops at our own work and does not reach the game or anything lifted from it.