FF7/Kernel/Kernel.bin

Important Files

PSX Version	PC Version
/INIT/KERNEL.BIN	/DATA/KERNEL/KERNEL.BIN
	/DATA/KERNEL/KERNEL2.BIN

The KERNEL.BIN Archive

The file KERNEL.BIN archive is in BIN-GZIP format. It consists of 27 gziped sections concatenated together with a 6 byte header for each. This file is the same both on the PC and PSX versions. This holds all the static data and menu text for the game, with a look up table at the beginning of the section. The first 9 sections of data (i.e. The non-text related items) are in typical BIN file archive format. Sections 10-27 are FF Text files. The text sections have a header of pointers at the beginning of each section and point to a text block below.

The KERNEL.BIN file consists of the following sections.

File	Data	Offset
1	Command data	0x0006
2	Attack data	0x0086
3	Battle and growth data	0x063A
4	Initialization data	0x0F7F
5	Item data	0x111B
6	Weapon data	0x137A
7	Armor data	0x1A30
8	Accessory data	0x1B73
9	Materia data	0x1C11
10	Command descriptions	0x1F32
11	Magic descriptions	0x2199
12	Item descriptions	0x28D4
13	Weapon descriptions	0x2EE2
14	Armor descriptions	0x307B
15	Accessory descriptions	0x315F
16	Materia descriptions	0x3384
17	Key Item descriptions	0x3838
18	Command Names	0x3BE2
19	Magic Names	0x3CCA
20	Item Names	0x4293
21	Weapon Names	0x4651
22	Armor Names	0x4B02
23	Accessory Names	0x4C4B
24	Materia Names	0x4D90
25	Key Item Names	0x5040
26	Battle and Battle-Screen Text	0x5217
27	Summon Attack Names	0x5692

The KERNEL2.BIN Archive

On the PC version there exists a secondary kernel archive called KERNEL2.BIN. This archive contains only sections 10-27 (Text data) of KERNEL.BIN. The data was ungzipped from the original archive, concatenated together, and then LZSed into a single archive with a 4 byte header giving the length of the file.

The maximum allotted storage space on the PC version for all un-LZSed data in the kernel2.bin is 27KB (27648 bytes). This means that the total size of the extracted files (text and pointers) must be less than this.