Big Archive

Description:

Big files are an archive format, that was used in many game titles created by EA Studios

Specification:

Header

The header has a fixed size of 16 bytes, following the table below:

Offset	Bytes	Type	Name
0	4	CHAR[]	FOURCC
4	4	UINT	SIZE
8	4	UINT	NUM_ENTRIES
12	4	UINT	OFFSET_FIRST

• FOURCC: Identifies the string as valid big archive. The string may either be "BIG4" or "BIGF", depending on the version.
• SIZE: The entire size of an big archive. Size of a single archive can not be greater than 2^32 bytes
• NUM_ENTRIES: Number of files that were packed into this archive
• OFFSET_FIRST: The offset inside the file to the first entry

List of entries

After the header the follows a list with NUM_ENTRIES elements, each entry looks the following:

Offset	Bytes	Type	Name
0	4	UINT	ENTRY_OFFSET
4	4	UINT	ENTRY_SIZE
8	N	CSTRING	ENTRY_NAME

• ENTRY_OFFSET: specified the start of this entry inside the file (in bytes)
• ENTRY_SIZE: the size of the specified entry
• ENTRY_NAME: the name of this entry, read as a nullterminated string