ROM Hack SOS: Rippin' Sounds

[geoprimedonna]

Yo guys! I want to rip some sounds from NDS and GBA games, but I am having a really REALLY hard time. Can anybody help?

If you'd like, can you send the the transformed files? The main one I want transformed is Shining Stars Super Starcade.

 

[FAST6191]

If you just want them for playback the standard for DS is probably still 2sf (there was an alternative that some people were investigating).

I am not inclined to do the full rundown of GBA and DS sound hacking right now, not least of all because I have few things with pictures in the ROM hacking docs
http://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2014-edition-out.73394/

Suffice it to say
For the GBA the so called Sappy format is the main one seen in GBA games, it is pretty common but not as common/high a percentage as the DS stuff covered in a moment.

For the DS there is a format known as SDAT that the vast majority of games use. http://sourceforge.net/projects/vgmtoolbox/files/vgmtoolbox/ does the 2sf stuff mentioned before, you may need to flank it with caitsith2's rip kit which can be hard to find these days.

Both consoles have weird and wonderful formats that some games use instead of those, and sometimes in addition to the standard. If you are lucky they are well known formats like wave, mod and XM, or a standard within games like ADX/AHX, if you are unlucky then you get to spent some quality time learning the hardware for the respective consoles. Usually formats stick pretty close to the hardware but that does not necessarily make it easy.

Edit. Had a little poke around Shining Stars Super Starcade, it might not have sdat and it appears to be one of the games that uses lua. I will investigate further.

Edit 2. Ooh, raw lua with what looks like comments in Italian. I hope this means you have easy edits for this game.. Many thanks for pointing me at this one.
The game sound effects use a file format called "sfx" which I can just about get to import in audacity with a lot of noise. ( ShiningStars.sfx, 11025Hz, signed 8 bit PCM, though all that means little at this point).
SFX, the small sizes and the names would lead me to believe they are sound effects rather than music.
Fortunately there are also files in the Sound folder with the extension .mus and sensible looking names, however the sizes are tiny which means they are likely sequenced audio. Looking at the hex of them they are not any format I recognise and have nothing I can really latch onto to pull them apart on the spot right now.
Edit another. Might as well have a shot of the lua, I did not so much as have to decompress it.

 

[geoprimedonna]

Man, I didn't understand a single thing! I tried that, but my PC and the program "got mad at me".AKA:

(JUST KIDDIN'!!! The program just didn't do what it was supposted to... )​

Can you please upload it somewhere (4shared, megaupload, torrents, whatchamacallit) please? It would be a BIG favor. If you could put a video as well, it would be useful for me and other users... Thanks though, bro!
Edit: SSSS was a game inspired on a now "killed" virtual world. You can see what it used to look like here...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080405004730/http://www.shiningstars.com/
I LOVED this place and cherished it a lot when I was a kid. Now, back to the rippin': please show me the files I need and a video to orient me. You may want to PM me the links to the places and if possible, send the sounds to me as files, too.
Thanks again!!!

 

[Auryn]

Edit 2. Ooh, raw lua with what looks like comments in Italian. I hope this means you have easy edits for this game.. Many thanks for pointing me at this one.
The game sound effects use a file format called "sfx" which I can just about get to import in audacity with a lot of noise. ( ShiningStars.sfx, 11025Hz, signed 8 bit PCM, though all that means little at this point).
SFX, the small sizes and the names would lead me to believe they are sound effects rather than music.
Fortunately there are also files in the Sound folder with the extension .mus and sensible looking names, however the sizes are tiny which means they are likely sequenced audio. Looking at the hex of them they are not any format I recognise and have nothing I can really latch onto to pull them apart on the spot right now.
Edit another. Might as well have a shot of the lua, I did not so much as have to decompress it.
View attachment 11728

Yeap, Italian with errors in every sentence LOL
ai_startmove = 3000; the higher this value, the more the cpu will try to go toward the disc
ai_timedummymin = 60*6; wait time before dummy will disconnect
ai_timedummymax = 60*2; wait time before dummy will reconnect
ai_speedshoot = 70; (a value) higher as 80, it will increase the change of making a "strong shot".

 

[FAST6191]

I did not get anything resembling a usable rip I am afraid geoprimedonna, all I really did was confirm the SFX was some kind of PCM/ADPCM wave file and wonder at the .mus stuff.
If you just want rips to listen to then I can probably help you set up the game/emulator so you can loop it back and get it that way -- we can either kill the sound effects so they do not go over the top of the music (or vice versa if you want the SFX), and possibly fiddle with channels in the emulator to blank certain things. Otherwise it is going to be a proper project to figure this stuff out.

 

[geoprimedonna]

No problem. I can just figure it out, although I'm a rookie. But still, teach me what you did. Still, there are still another few on my list... The Build-a-Bear Workshop one, for example, is a go. Just do like I said: send it via file sharing site and I'll do stuff my ways. As for the .gba's, here's my list:
Cabbage Patch Kids: The Patch Puppy
My Little Pony: The Runaway Rainbow
Dragon Tales: Dragon Adventures
Care Bears: Care Quest
Strawberry Shortcake: Ice Cream Riding Camp
Strawberry Shortcake-Summertime Adventure
Yeah, long list there... It's best to teach a man to fish so they won't bother you for a day or two. hehe It's my sister's fav games. We have an emulator on her tablet.

 

[FAST6191]

In audacity there are options to import raw audio, older versions (or at least one that I had) used to be able to do ADPCM as well but newer versions can not.
Anyway file -> import -> raw data. From there you select the file and are given options to decode it. Typically the DS developers do not use high quality sounds so I dropped the sample rate and tried the lower bit depth and mono things first.

The reason I tried it is because the DS has an onboard PCM and ADPCM decoder, one that the SDAT format kind of uses and most other custom formats also use (electroplankton uses actual wave files, N+ uses PCM, the stuff I pulled from I think it was an adventure time was also raw audio at some level) -- if there is hardware accelerated decoding you tend to use it and that means I try that before I launch into full on code reverse engineering. I did not find the exact settings it used, I could probably fire it through an emulator (desmume has a pretty good sound chip viewer) and it would say some stuff I could also try.

I took a look at the Build a Bear game. It has a SDAT sound file, also all the other files (2d and 3d graphics) are classic DS formats (nsbmd, nsbtx, nsbca, NANR, NCGR, NCER.....), some viewable BMP images and a raw text file which was nice to see.

 

[geoprimedonna]

Can you please PM me the link to the files? You can send it via 4shared or MegaUpload. Thanks!

 

[FAST6191]

I did not rip anything for the Build a Bear stuff and I have nothing useful for the Shining Stars Super Starcade, not to mention it is still copyrighted audio and I can no more share it around here than I can a MP3 of song hit single.

 

[geoprimedonna]

I did not rip anything for the Build a Bear stuff and I have nothing useful for the Shining Stars Super Starcade, not to mention it is still copyrighted audio and I can no more share it around here than I can a MP3 of song hit single.

Yeah. But still, what the heck am I supposted to do to get where you got???

EDIT: Ok. So I'm in VGMToolbox and I put it to find and extract them SDATs. Where are they? Now what do I do?

 

[FAST6191]

The .SFX and .mus files in Shining Stars Super Starcade are just files in the ROM. Any tool that pulls apart DS ROMs (ndstool, ndsts, tinke, nitro explorer, crystaltile2.....) should be able to grab them for you. I fed the raw SFX into audacity like I said above, however I did not find the right settings and there have been other things I should have taken care of beforehand -- without properly pulling it all apart I can not say.

Build a Bear should just be a matter of making a 2sf using vgmtoolbox (plus caitsith2's rip kit) and playing it back with something like foobar that has vio2sf (I see there is a new version/fork at http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_input_vio2sf ).

 

[geoprimedonna]

Well, another thing: what do I do to rip .gba's with Toolbox??? Where do I find finished files?