SOLVED: Teboview / TVW file format specification now supported

[Inflex]

EDIT: FlexBV5 now has Teboview support.  Full, demo and free editions have the support build in now.
https://pldaniels.com/flexbv5

No - the source won't be available, sorry, 2 years of slogging away with this format and sadly it's just something I need to keep closed for now until I've recouped enough.


I'm starting to see a few boardview files showing up with a 'tvw' extention, known supposedly as Teboview format.

A quick look at the format shows it's not encrypted/encoded but it is using non-text representation of various parts of data ( numbers and perhaps block sizes )

Before I attempt the painful process of reverse-engineering the format, I was hoping perhaps someone here was privy to the file format specification?

I figure it must be out there somewhere because I know of at least one non-commercial ( but closed source ) boardview suite that decodes it.

Regards

(first portion of a file viewed with ghex attached as image)

[Inflex]

Have disected various parts of the file format, most of what I'm needing is at the end of the file,  netlist, part lists, and package outlines, but one thing that's truly confounding (frustrating!) me is that in the part definitions the way they're referencing the network list is leaving me stumped. I can see the values they're using but there seems to be an intermediate table involved somewhere.

~1800 nets in this file, we we'll assume this format doesn't cripple itself, and uses a 32-bit uint but in the part structure, which ties together package, placement, pins, the pins have what seems more like a 16-bit reference with an odd behaviour, that it increments by 8 most times it's used on a chip, ie, all the GND pins on a chip, first one might be 0xD0C4,  next one will be 0xD8C4,  then 0xE0C4 ( little endian, sorry )

Normally you'd anticipate that the pin would just refer back to the one fixed network table entry, I'm sure there's a reason but it's *beeep*ing me right off.

There also seems to be no real rhyme/reason for the initial base value (yet)

Consider a connector ( see image of hex dump ),  pins 8, 10, 14, 19 and 20 are GND and you can see they have a '9C' byte (4th column),  and it also has NC pins 16,17, and 18 which have '17' byte in 4th column

[Inflex]

I've created a github repo for consolidating all the bits of information gained and ultimately an implementation of a decoder.

https://github.com/inflex/teboviewformat

[Psi]

[Inflex]

Didn't take too long - we've got the main part of it all cracked open now.

[Inflex]

After 2 years I've finally cracked through the bulk of this format, enough that it'll be good for boardview & schem repairs.

Available at https://pldaniels.com/flexbv5  in the full, demo and free versions of FlexBV5.