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Saturn games with ADPCM.DAT
DBOY - Jun 21, 2002
  DBOY Jun 21, 2002
I was poking through Gulliver Boy and saw the ominous ADPCM.DAT. I realized I may finally have a chance of ripping the oh so awesome runpen song However no saturn AIFF ADPCM audio converters worked on it. When I tried acpk2avi (which can also handle audio) it said it was an unsupported XA audio format.

Does anyone know what i could use to playt his file or at least convert it to another format? I tried a few PSX XA tools (XAEX and PSMPlay) with no success. Any help would be appreciated.

 M3d10n Jun 21, 2002
It's a wild guess, since I never played that game, but maybe it's in ADX format? Or that .dat file is a package file. For both cases, there's an interesting tool for Saturn that can playback them: cinepack.exe (dull name...)

It can play ADP, ADX, CPK, CPK+ADX (Burning Rangers, Lunar2) and chunked ADP/ADX files (Grandia).

I can't remember where I found it... it's a worthy util, and should be in SX's misc section.

I put it up in my personal webspace: here...

 MasterAkumaMatata Jun 22, 2002

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by DBOY@June 21 2002,01:59



I was poking through Gulliver Boy and saw the ominous ADPCM.DAT. I realized I may finally have a chance of ripping the oh so awesome runpen song  However no saturn AIFF ADPCM audio converters worked on it. When I tried acpk2avi (which can also handle audio) it said it was an unsupported XA audio format.



Does anyone know what i could use to playt his file or at least convert it to another format? I tried a few PSX XA tools (XAEX and PSMPlay) with no success. Any help would be appreciated.


I see the acronym PCM in the file name. Have you tried renaming the file extension accordingly and open with any of the PCM filters (highlighted in yellow below) using Cool Edit?

  • 8-bit signed (*.sam)

    A/mu-Law Wave (*.wav)

    ACM Waveform (*.wav)

    Amiga IFF-8SVX (*.iff; *.svx)

    Apple AIFF (*.aif, *.snd)

    ASCII Text Data (*.txt)

    Creative Sound Blaster (*.voc)

    Dialogic ADPCM (*.vox)

    DiamondWare Digitized (*.dwd)

    DVI/IMA ADPCM (*.wav)

    Microsoft ADPCM (*.wav)

    MPEG 3 (FhG) (*.mp3)

    Next/Sun (*.au; *.snd)

    NMS vce (*.vce)

    Pika ADPCM/8000Hz (*.vox; *.*)

    SampleVision (*.smp)

    VBase ADPCM (*.vba)

    Windows PCM (*.wav)

    PCM Raw Data (*.pcm)

    All files (*.*)

  DBOY Jun 26, 2002
yeah, I tried soundforge as well and it always just said it was a corrupt file.

When viewing it in a hex editor I saw no indication of any kind of file table to show there's more than raw data int his guy.

My guess is it's because Gulliver Boy was originally a PC-Engine game. Rather than really rewrite everything and make a load of individual audio files, maybe they just re-used the same compressed PCM audio track that PC-Engine port used for it's voices?

 M3d10n Jun 26, 2002
Try renaming it to .raw and open it as a RAW sound file. Play with the settings, one might work (Motorolla, I think...).

 DBOY Jun 27, 2002
Making some progress. Using the Dialogic ADPCM filter, I was able to play the first 10 mins of the file. Then there's a 30 min gap before more sound starts, and all sound fromt hat point on is horribly scratchy and corrupt. But the first 10 mins were perfect.

It 16000Hz. Other suggestions?

BTW I tried both Cool Edit Pro and Cool Edit 2000 and neither had Pika ADPCM/8000Hz (*.vox; *.*) or VBase ADPCM (*.vba).

 MasterAkumaMatata Jun 27, 2002

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by DBOY@June 27 2002, 6:06 AM



BTW I tried both Cool Edit Pro and Cool Edit 2000 and neither had Pika ADPCM/8000Hz (*.vox; *.*) nor VBase ADPCM (*.vba).



 DBOY Jun 28, 2002
That's not at all what my version of Cool Edit Pro looks like. At all.

What version is that?

 MasterAkumaMatata Jun 28, 2002
Cool Edit Pro Version 1.2

 Azazel Jun 29, 2002
If you have the PC Engine version you should able to rip it from that as their are a few tools for ripping stuff like that.

 MasterAkumaMatata Jul 13, 2002

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by DBOY@June 28 2002,17:36



That's not at all what my version of Cool Edit Pro looks like. At all.



What version is that?


What version did you use?

 DBOY Oct 20, 2002
I got bored and played with ADPCM.DAT a bit more today. It actually has 2,236 files inside it. But there's no indexing (the index is probably ADPCM.IDX but I couldn't figure out it's format in the 3 mins it had my attention).

I came up with another idea and used WinHex to generate an offset list of occurances of "FORM" since the first four letters of each file in it were form. Then I wrote myself a little PHP script:

$fd = fopen ("WinHex.pos", "rb");

$point = 20;

fseek ($fd, $point, SEEK_SET);

for ($i=0; $i<2236; $i++) {

$pointer = fread ($fd, 38);

$offset[$i] = hexdec(bin2hex(strrev(substr ($pointer, 0, 8))));

$point = $point + 38;

fseek ($fd, $point, SEEK_SET);

}

$offset[2236] = "116277248";

fclose ($fd);

$fd = fopen ("ADPCM.DAT", "rb");

for ($i=0; $i<(count($offset)-1); $i++) {

fseek ($fd, $offset[$i], SEEK_SET);

$output = fread ($fd, ($offset[$i+1]-$offset[$i]));

$fo = fopen(("C:\\Inetpub\\wwwroot\\gulliver\\ADPCM_" . str_pad($i, 4, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT) . ".PCM"), "w");

fputs($fo, $output);

fclose($fo);

//echo (dechex($offset[$i]) . "

");

}

fclose ($fd);

Long story short I now have all 2236 files. I was trying ot play them in Soundforge using the RAW input and found things sounded closes when opened as 8,000Hz, 8-bit Sign-Bit Mono audio but there's a LOT of noise int he background and the volume seems wonky. But you can definitly hear what's being said.

I'm gonna grab CoolEdit in a few mins and try what you suggested quite a while ago. Maybe it will have something closer.

BTW for anyone who cares I think Dracula X: Noctourne in the Moonlight used DVI ADPCM so someone could probably rip the soundtrack for it. It would be neat to get MP3's of the music fromt he two new wings of the castle.

 DBOY Oct 20, 2002
I noticed the Pika/ADPCM 8000Hz in your list so I tried the Dialogic VOX ADPCM in Soundforge and blamo, it opened and played iwth no noise. But it was way slow. I saved it and sped it up 25% in MS Sound Recorder and it was dead on perfect.

Finally Been wanting to get some of the songs from this game for a long time now

For anyone wondering, song index 997 (assuming song 1 is 0) is the bum song in the ADPCM.DAT on Disc 1 of Gulliver Boy