ROM Hack [requesting help] Ripping PMD2 Music

[rush n kaos]

(I do apologize if this specific question has been asked before here, or if this is the wrong place to ask.)

A while ago I started extracting music from some NDS games cause I wanted to play some of the tunes on the piano... I wanted to extract the music from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky but instead of the SDAT file with all the sounds, there was a weird bunch of files with the .SWD and .SMD extensions which I have no idea what to do with...

Google didn't really help, the programs I used didn't work either. Been searching for... I would say, combined time of at least 5-8 hours and found nothing, was hoping someone here has seen this and might know something about it

Is there any way at all to work with these files? There's 5 folders full of them in the place where the sound data should be (folders labeled BGM, ME, SE, SWD, SYSTEM)
If there is a way, is it possible to convert them into Midi?

Thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to help me.

 

[joaowojcikiewicz]

*BUMP*

I want to know how to extract, play, convert those files into midi, or just convert to a .sdat file...
Me and my brother started to extract nds roms to rip musics, sounds and gfx off.

Anyone know how to open those files?
Thanks

 

[Knyaz Vladimir]

*BUMP*

I want to know how to extract, play, convert those files into midi, or just convert to a .sdat file...
Me and my brother started to extract nds roms to rip musics, sounds and gfx off.

Anyone know how to open those files?
Thanks

Very bad boy, reviving threads.

There is near no documentation on this, the sounds are the same as PMD1 anyway, so rip Blue instead.

 

[FAST6191]

It looks like a new/uncommon format. Short of properly reverse engineering* it your best bet is to use an emulator and loop back any sounds (you can drop channels too so no SFX are played over BGM and vice versa) not to mention you can also hack the game to play different sounds at a different point (credits music for intro music or something like that) so you can grab all you need.

*reverse engineering here is probably not going to be that bad- custom DS audio and indeed SDAT for that matter has always fairly close to the hardware supported formats (usually some form of PCM or ADPCM) or either based on or actually a use of one of the more common game formats (see they ADX AHX stuff from CRI Middleware)- developing a true new multimedia format is expensive not to mention you will be dogged by patents at every step and not likely to be supported by the hardware.

I would not place too much stock in what the extension is- the DS itself does not so anything much in this regard and most of anything here is just a leftover from development. Indeed aside from the known formats the best info an extension tends to give is when it shows if a file is compressed or not.
What you want to look at more is the header (or indeed end of) the files in question- they will usually have far more good info.
http://www.ringthis.com/dev/wave_format.htm and http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/wavefiles.html
http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/midifiles.html
Sticking with the DS for a moment http://llref.emutalk.net/nds_formats.htm details a few nice things.
Also
http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/GRAFs/All
http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=...ry:Game_Formats

Better yet if as Knyaz Vladimir says there is another game using the formats it provides a nice avenue for drag and drop type testing (finding out what files are linked to what and how they appear in ram/on system). Also have a look at other systems (I recall a Mystery Dungeon game on the GBA) and games in the series (or anything the developers have likely touched or brought in- obviously not here but you buy in the Unreal engine and you will be probably using unreal formats)- game development is all about cost cutting and this reuse of things makes life good if you are a hacker.

 

[Knyaz Vladimir]

Sorry for not replying so long, but all three 4th generation PMD games have this format (Time, Darkness, Sky)