pspimage files suddenly not valid

[jaydan]

Help please!

Recently some pspimage files I've been working on suddenly became not valid. PSP can't open them, and sometimes just abruptly closes when trying to open them.

I'm using PSP X9, all the files were created in that version. I've noticed that the files that no longer open all contain text, while images that don't contain text will open just fine.

I recently installed some updates to Windows 10, which is the only thing I think has changed since I saved them last.

I also just purchased PSP 2020 to see if I could bring them in there, but PSP 2020 won't open any of the files I've saved from X9, even ones without text. It says they're all not valid.

Has anyone else had this or a similar issue? Is 2020 not backwards compatible with X9? Is there any way to validate the files? It says to check if the files are valid, is that a thing I can actually do?

Any help would really be appreciated! Thanks

[LeviFiction]

It is backwards compatible. We don't know why this "corruption" happens but if you're willing to share some files I've been working on trying to create a script to analyze and potentially recover the files if possible.

[jaydan]

Thanks very much for responding. Yeah I looked around the forums and have found others with similar issues. Thanks for working on it!

Here's an image that won't open. It's very small and simple; contains text, layers, some raters, but nothing much. Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.

[LeviFiction]

Thank you very much. It'll take a few days, my script only helps interpret the file, I still do most of this manually right now. But already I see one oddity. It means nothing by itself, I'm working off of a PSP 9 version of the File Format docs so a lot has changed since then. But this is giving a version # of 14. And technically 13 is the highest it should go (X8-2020 file format). I've only seen this once before and I have no idea why it's like that. But changing it down to version 13 causes PSP to crash rather than give a bad format error. So I have to be careful.

I can see the Edit History of your image so that'll help.

Quick Basic run-down: 2000x2000 px image at 72ppi. 24 bi. Compressed using LZ77. 7 layers. Both Raster and Vector layers. First layer is 'Raster 3'(2000x2000). Last layer is Raster 1. (293x127). I was able to recover an image of a guitar, the top part of the guitar with the pins, and the bridge. As well as some raster text "Acoustic Guitar Terminology".

This is all just a basic exploratory, however, I've yet to program the parts that read vectors so I'll get on that tomorrow.

[jaydan]

Interesting!

The vectors are all probably just single lines and squares, pointing from a text box with terms to the rasters. I have a .jpg of this image, I don't know whether it's exactly like the pspimage, but would that help you to know what to look for? I can upload it tonight

[LeviFiction]

That's not necessary but thank you. No, from here it's just a matter of reading all of the data to try and find out what doesn't match the expected specifications.

But to do that I need to program all of the information structures to copy the data into. The majority of this work will be done on the weekends.

If everything checks out, then I will also make an encoder to recombine the data into a new PSP image file and see if that fixes it. If not, then manual recreation and saving in PSP to compare a working version against a corrupted one. With the hope of eventually automating all of this

[jaydan]

You're a legend. I'm sure a lot of people will be helped by your efforts. Again please let me know if there's anything I can do. Cheers!

[jaydan]

It looks like it's something wrong with Windows. I tried uninstalling PSP X9, reinstalling it, making a little test image, saving it, closing it, then tried to open it again and it says it's invalid. I can't open any pspimage file with it at all.

I don't know what could have happened. It must have been the latest updates to Windows 10 because I was using the program regularly before that with no issues.

I might have to switch to another program because whatever they did to the text tool in the 2020 version has limited it dramatically and made it very frustrating to use.

I appreciate your work on my files, and wish you well on making your script, but I think I may be done with this program

[LeviFiction]

Are you on the development release of Windows? Because that seems unlikely to be that cause. The file is being corrupted in some way. The first question why it's being corrupted so we can stop it. And the next question is how it's corrupted so it can be recovered if at all possible. Havee you tried factory resetting PSP?

Hold shift and open PSP it will ask you to reset PSP. This is different from uninstalling and reinstalling as registry settings may still exist that further corrupts it. Holding shift when starting PSP forces it to overwrite the data and start fresh.

[jaydan]

I'm not using a development release of Windows. Yeah you're probably right, it just seemed like the only thing that changed.

I did the shift key reset, but it's still having the same problem. Anything I create and save is corrupt. I also tried saving it uncompressed, which made no difference, but when I saved it as an X8 compatible file it worked, so it seems to be something happening when it saves as an X9 compatible file. At least I figured that out!

[LeviFiction]

Can you create a file to share that was successful with X8 compatibilty but not X9? I would be curious to test one of those out as well see if I can duplicate the issue.

[jaydan]

For sure. Here is the same image saved with both x9 and x8 compatibility. It has 3 layers; a raster background, one shape vector, and one text vector. I checked and sure enough the x8 file opens fine while the x9 does not.

[LeviFiction]

Thank you very much, this is going to be fun. First thing I notice is that there is a six byte difference between the files, and the version number is incorrect for the X9 format. And that six byte difference happens around layer Vector 1 with the text object. I haven't even run it through my script yet, this is just me eyeballing the hex code. But that's because I'm only half way through properly coding the vector reading pieces. But I know where I'm going to focus my attention.

So it definitely looks like something related to Text as you're thinking. Though what that is I'm not sure yet.

[migf1]

...I'm working off of a PSP 9 version of the File Format docs so a lot has changed since then...

Levi, are those docs publicly available somewhere? I'd love to have a look at them (or newer versions if possible).

[LeviFiction]

I sent you a PM with a few links to all of the data I have.

I don't know of a newer spec so there is a lot of saving the same file in mulitple formats to see when something changed. Like the Text Attribute info chunk. In the version specs I have it's 94 BYTES long. But in both files Jayden presented it's 95 Bytes long. This appears to have changed with file format X8-2020.

I noticed something else odd, the X9 format file shows a very odd deformation matrix value. Normally I expect it to look like [[1,0,0],[0,1,0], [0,0,1]] , this shows properly in the X8 file but the X9 one is showing [[1,0,99.5],[0,1,58.5], [0,0,1]] which I believe is invalid. Could be wrong, but it seems odd those two values not being zero in one version but not the other. Oh well it's 3am I'm going to bed.