How to extract Harbinger's archive files tutorial

Introduction

Harbinger by Silverback Entertainment runs on a custom engine. This engine was only used for 1 title, as the game financially underperformed and the studio closed down shortly afterwards. As a result it uses a lot of proprietary formats.

However Harbinger's archive formats at the very least have been cracked and can be opened via DragonUnpacker. I'll go over how to do it here. This tutorial is made in hopes that it might interest people in reverse engineering Harbinger's graphics formats so we can extract its textures and sprites one day.

What you will need

• A copy of the game. You can acquire Harbinger legally from GamersGate.com currently.
• DragonUnpacker

Opening Harbinger's files

First, install both the game and DragonUnpacker. Then set the files of type to Harbinger .SQH and go to the game's directory.

res0.sqh is where the majority of the files are. So let's open that.

From here we can extract all of the game's formats. Unfortunately as of writing this tutorial it's not possible to open or convert the graphics files. The graphics files are a proprietary format called .gim. Which isn't the same as the PSP .gim graphics format. However we can view dialogue, script and audio files pretty easily.

If you want to extract the ost in particular it's located in res0.sqh/res/common/music

Conclusion

Hopefully we'll be able to play around with Harbinger's file formats more in the future. But for right now we can at least extract the archives. I'll update this tutorial in the future if the situation changes.