Had some progress. Clean Windows 7 32 bit VM in VMWare Workstation, 1GB VRAM applied. Able to get both 3D Ripper DX and Ninjaripper to hook into the game but Gameguard borks right after I get logged in with an NP1013 error code. So I am taking a wild guess that is a key point in the process that Gameguard does some checks before the player actually gets on the server.

Haven't had a chance to try the character creation demo yet but have it installed. Will require me to try and recreate my character from scratch but shouldn't be too difficult.

As far as weapons go, and for those who are familiar with the file extraction process, how difficult are those to come by at this stage? Or is that going to come down to modelling them by hand?