The Return of the King PC Help

[fudge]

Afternoon,

I am trying desperately to extract the audio from the Return of the King on PC. Game extractor can open the games .scw files but the files are a scrambled mess of .sono and .shoc files. Running MFAudio on the .scw files allows me to hear the grunts of the characters perfectly clear, but actual dialogue and music is so hideously compressed that you can only just about make it out.

If anybody has any advice on how I can go about getting the audio out of this game I would be very appreciative!

I have included a link to one .scw file (for the Black gate) for reference - https://1drv.ms/u/s!ArXMmzOtC8DfiVHuuJD_hs4uMemb

Cheers,
Fudge

[fudge]

Anybody had any ideas? I can pay you in my gratitude.

[fudge]

What about if I name my first child after you?

[fudge]

Okay what about if I draw you as Gandalf riding a panda snake?

[Puterboy1]

Did you take this up with Xentax. Maybe they will be able to help you.

[fudge]

Did you take this up with Xentax. Maybe they will be able to help you.

Thanks mate. I'll put the same thread up there and post back any useful answers here. Cheers.

[fudge]

Did you take this up with Xentax. Maybe they will be able to help you.

Thanks mate. I'll put the same thread up there and post back any useful answers here. Cheers.

Hi me from the past,

Good news, we got somewhere! We don't have all of it, but we got all the dialogue, SFX, music and ambience that plays on each mission. General audio, so most SFX including character grunts/deaths, are still buried in the files so its not complete!

For anybody else looking to do this the process isn't super clean!

You can do this on the PS2 ISO, not the bloody PC copy! You need to extract the modules/data from the game using any old PS2 ISO extractor, I used Apache3, and then you need can use "ADPCM Player v1.44h" to scan the .SCO files for each mission and it will pull out all of the SFX, Music and Dialogue - for cutscenes these are premixed so you won't be able to pull anything cleanly out of these!

These are all in stereo so on ADPCM you will need to set the interleave to 4000, set the frequency to 23000 and set the number of channels to 2.

Now here's the awkward bit! For most character dialogue these settings will miss the last .5s of 75% of the files. I have played with the settings on ADPCM but I cannot resolve this. The only solution is to extract these cut-off files as 1 channel files (Mono). This will give you the full audio file, BUT, the audio will loop. Most files will loop once however long files can loop 2-3 times. The only way to fix this is to open these files in Audacity and manually delete the looping segments.

This is a labour intensive process but even at its worst it'll only take a day or so - its mostly just boring!

In terms of the files there isn't much new stuff in here, but there's definitely a few nice bits of dialogue that don't play in game.

This eluded me for years so I hope it is of some use to others! One day hopefully we'll be able to extract everything else buried in this old game, but for now we've at least got something!

P.S If any clever clogs manage to break into the other files in this damn game they will have my thanks!

Cheers,

[TobiyoGantzerZX]

I did somewhat a similar process for both RotK and The Two Towers. I BELIEVE that the only stuff I'm missing from RotK is some of the character grunts, that either didn't come out during my extraction/got lost among files I had to fix, or simply, they weren't included in the ps2 version compared to the PC version.
Anyways, considering the world of suffering this game put me through, I got what I salvaged and made my projects just fine. Same VAs (for the most part) from Battle For Middle Earth, Conquest and all them games from that era of licensed Middle Earth games.