MapForums

Folks,

Is there anyone that can direct me to information on how the MPS files of Pocket Streets are formatted? I've heard they are just Access 2000 databases with headers, but can't seem to find any concrete information.

Really, all I'm looking for is the data on the top left and bottom right coordinates of the particular map. I want to read this information from the file though for a program on the iPaq.

Regards,

Jason

I haven't seen the mps format documented anywhere, sorry. Where did you hear it was Access format?

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I found a vague reference in a web search that it had a special header but the bulk of the file was Access 2000 format. I couldn't really see that from looking at a hex dump of a sample file.

Jason

Has anyone had any luck finding it. I've been looking for it also?

I'm still curious myself.. some guys in here figured out that the demographics mdb passw is very weak, but I would imagine they would make the .mps files more secure as they have the more valuable cartographic data.

Eric

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As far as I can tell, the MPS files don't have much to do with Access - or any other standard format, for that matter.

They're somewhat bizarre. They're not encrypted. Text is in a mixture of Unicode and non-Unicode. Some strings have their length specified, some have a zero to end them. Some strings are stored verbose, some compressed using a peculiar common prefix elimination method. There seems to be masses of padding, using both zeros and a 2-byte padding number, but it's not padded to any sensible boundaries.

Anyone fancy having a look to figure them out?

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