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• Test with TrId http://mark0.net/soft-tridnet-e.html
• Try with hex editor that supports showing memory areas as images
• If you have any knowledge of the format kaitai struct may be useful for visualizing and parsing it

Often times (especially so for visual novels) there are ready made tools for reading custom image formats, like suzie image viewer and it's numerous plugins.

http://mark0.net/soft-tridnet-e.html

If you can't be bothered to make the necessary registry changes for the context menu yourself you can find an install script here: https://master.ayra.ch/FTP/#/applications/Tools/TRID

> I can see files in .file format

Are you certain that the file is an unknown file format. It could just be mislabeled (i.e. extension is missing/wrong).

Have a look at TrID or the GUI tool, assuming you're on a Windows machine.

If you're on a Mac device, open up the terminal and run file $file.file to figure out the file type

TrID will be a good solution here. It's made to identify files, and can rename them for you. The command:

trid c:\folder* -ae

Should find extensions and rename for you, for all files in the given folder.

There's also a GUI version here., but it will only accept single files.

Because file content is not encoded in cp1252?

Judging by file preview (width of lines to number of lines ratio and file content itself), I would guess that this file is not text file in the first place. This looks like binary data interpreted as text. Probably file was zipped, rared, gzipped, tared or compressed in some other way?

So, your first task is figuring out what this file actually is. On unix-like machines, you could use file command to do that; there is an old version of file available for Windows, but I have no idea how difficult it might be to install and use it. On Windows, there is something called TrID (with graphical version - you probably want to try it in the first place), but I have never used it and I have no idea how plausible it might be.

Once you figure out what kind of file it actually is, change it's extension accordingly. This will allow Windows to associate it with relevant program. If you don't have one available already, you should try searching the web for some info how to open that file type under Windows.

Assuming that this is compressed file, you should then repeat above procedure for each file that was stored in the file you have. Only when you identify files relevant for you and fix their extensions you should try opening it in OpenOffice.

Check date created not just last modified.

I would either delete them, or move them off your computer and see what happens ie. make sure your computer functions fine without them.

If some virus or nefarious ftp program is putting them there, there should be some kind of program running. Is there anything questionable in Task Manager? You can either google running processes you're unsure about or run HijackThis then analyze the log here or here.

In my experience, a bad processes tend to have non-sensical names, and/or the description will match the name when you look at them in task manager, though this won't always be the case. The analyzers above should do a good job at flagging anything that needs to be more closely looked in to.

Btw blue text means they're compressed so if you open any of them in notepad or something it won't look like anything. You'd have to figure out what filetype they are then uncompress them. It could be one big .rar split up or individual compressed files.

You could try uncompressing with 7zip, or use something like this to determine the file type. (just found with a quick google, there may be better programs if you google 'how to determine file type' or something like that)

This message indicates that the file is not a valid ROM file.

Possibilities that might cause this:

1. ROMs are not done downloading. Make sure the download is listed as complete in the application that is doing the download before trying to use the ROMs (with a torrent client, a good one will tell you when individual files are done).
2. ROMs are corrupted. Unlikely but not impossible. Find a different download.
3. File downloaded were not ROMs but ended up with ROM names by accident (eg, right-click -> save link as should usually never be done as it is easy to accidentally grab a useless HTML file).
4. You messed with working files and broke them somehow. For example, changing file extensions by renaming will break the files. Windows warns you when you do this, listen to it.

[Edit: You can try this tool to test conditions 3 and 4: http://mark0.net/soft-tridnet-e.html. It will tell you the type of file the ROMs are. Note that trid doesn't actually know about GCM files... in my testing it thought they were CAT files... but you can use this to determine if they are actually ZIP, RAR, HTML, or some other file format instead of GCM.]

"file" on Linux, "tridnet" on Windows will tell you what file type it is.

However, if you know about file formats, you just open it with a hex editor. If the PDF file starts with "MZ" (exe header) instead of "%PDF-", student gets his well-deserved F.

TrIDNet - File Identifier http://mark0.net/soft-tridnet-e.html

I have staff who remove the file identifier off of the files they save. They'll forget what they opened it with, I can just drag it to tridnet and it lets me know what app should be used. Pretty handy stuff.