I'm interested in trying to rebuild the GameCube version of NFS: Most Wanted to play the full versions of the soundtrack featured in the other ports (the original disc forced the music to be cut down due to the GC's smaller media format but that's a non-issue when you're running the game as a disc image).
I've gotten as far as unpacking the containers that make up the game, switching the necessary file from other ports of the game into the GC version and repacking the files back into their containers, then rebuilding the GameCube ISO with those modified containers. This actually doesn't break the GC ISO (it will still boot up even with the wrong audio file) but it doesn't play music. So I need deeper insight into the structure of the file itself to understand (and potentially its companion file, which seems to be a header or pointer file of sorts that instructs the game what to play and when) what needs to be modified. It could also just be an encoding mismatch with the imported music file (the stock music file apparently encodes its music as GC-ADPCM format) and the structure of the file itself is the same across all versions of the game (although to do this that would still require breaking open the music file and subbing in the music that needs to be replaced with properly encoded versions of the replacement songs).
There seems to have been some work done on this in the past, since music has been made swappable for the PC version and thus interacting with the file that contains the music, but none of the tools I've found that interact with this format work with the GC's version of that file.
I know this is kind of a specific ask but I was wondering if someone had deeper insight into the way EA's games played music from that era.
I've gotten as far as unpacking the containers that make up the game, switching the necessary file from other ports of the game into the GC version and repacking the files back into their containers, then rebuilding the GameCube ISO with those modified containers. This actually doesn't break the GC ISO (it will still boot up even with the wrong audio file) but it doesn't play music. So I need deeper insight into the structure of the file itself to understand (and potentially its companion file, which seems to be a header or pointer file of sorts that instructs the game what to play and when) what needs to be modified. It could also just be an encoding mismatch with the imported music file (the stock music file apparently encodes its music as GC-ADPCM format) and the structure of the file itself is the same across all versions of the game (although to do this that would still require breaking open the music file and subbing in the music that needs to be replaced with properly encoded versions of the replacement songs).
There seems to have been some work done on this in the past, since music has been made swappable for the PC version and thus interacting with the file that contains the music, but none of the tools I've found that interact with this format work with the GC's version of that file.
I know this is kind of a specific ask but I was wondering if someone had deeper insight into the way EA's games played music from that era.
Last edited by SolidSonicTH,
