Tonic Trouble Special Edition - MPEG-like file decoding (extracted from .MPX archive)

[deton24]

Hello!

I look for help with decoding game audio file (sample):
https://yadi.sk/d/4-a8Fo2d_7iE2A

The file have "2RUS" in the beginning of the file (header?) probably responsible for Stereo (or 1RUS for mono).

It's probably some custom variant of MPEG, and presumably 16 bit 44kHz.

I tried to decode linked file on the top, with all tools listed here:

https://raymanpc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=24138&p=1125395#p1125395
(beside those from link on ngemu.com) and no result, or only noise.

It's extracted from MPX files with CSB relevant file with QuickBMS script written by Luigi:
https://aluigi.altervista.org/papers/quickbms.zip
https://aluigi.altervista.org/bms/tonic_...sb_mpx.bms

Inside MPX archive there were many similar segments with filenames corresponding to game levels (sound file from there is attached above).

More details (and game library responsible for decoding) provided here:
https://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?p=92056
and a bit here (but more about messing with game's music decoding):
https://raymanpc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=5981&start=80#p1183661
https://raymanpc.com/forum/viewtopic.php...0#p1156934


Or do you know where I could find people willing to look at this?
There were attempts with HCS, Xentax, Zenhax, VGMStream github, snailrush (Psound creator), dragon unpacker creator, and no luck.

Regards

[Pingus!]

I can take a look tonight at this probably... also sidenote: PSound won't work if the codec uses MPEG... because PSound looks for PS-ADPCM. As well, what platform are the game samples you took it from? As in, for the samples you provided, which console ISO did you extract them from?

[deton24]

Thank you for your reply!

The sample has been taken from Tonic Trouble for PC [Special Edition, version 8.7.0]. Available as abandonware on 16bit.pl (it is attached with Wine libraries to run on modern systems [set no more than 1600x900 or 1680x1050 in C:\Windows\Ubi\Ubi.ini to avoid crashes; run the game from desktop].

Retail version was already ripped, since it has different file format (probably similar to those in Rayman 2) and possibly worse quality. There is only on-the-fly rip from this release (recorded during the game).

All games based on OpenSpace engine on PC, have built-in mechanism repsonsible for downsample all audio files, even if game files are really 44kHz. Kooz and Synthesis were doing an extensive research about it. Changing decoding libraries can enhance samplerate a bit, but not to playback 44kHz.

If those files are really 44kHz, I can imagine how cool they can sound in comparison to currently known releases, since I put my hands on 44kHz files from PSX version of Rayman 2, and it was breathtaking....

[deton24]

How's it going?

I wrote on http://www.ctpax-x.org
I think it may be the last more place in the net to look for help.

[deton24]

I recently received the reply:

"We tried to look into this format. It's more complex than it may look like.

Actual information about .MPX files stored inside .BNM files. Even more, .BNM files itself can have inside .WAV files, or packed ADPCM files.

By now we only can extact uncompressed .WAV files:
http://www.ctpax-x.org/uploads/bnm_dump.zip

We will look into .MPX decompression, but can't promise anything, since it's very complex and required .DLL files, it needs a lot of internal structures to be initialized properly to work."

I'll let you know on something new, if I'll receive.

[deton24]

"Regarding to this last topic post.

1) First of all it's not CTPAX it's CTPAX-X Team. You're probably won't be pleased if someone cut your name in a half.

2) We should apologize since we didn't state it clearly but this tool we send you intended only to show you the progress we made so far. It's a test tool and by any means we do not want to distribute it. We have around 160 tools at our site and almost all of them released with the source codes - anyone can change it, compile or redistribute.
But we really don't want to distibute unfinished work since we have a few situations in the past when our WIP work was leaked but even after we released proper and finished work many years later people still somehow find our old unfinished tools somewhere in the Internet and complain that it didn't work or have bugs or errors. It's very unpleasant, frustrating and ruining any motivation to continue our work.

You can have this tool, but please do not post links to our software unless it was officially published at main www.CTPAX-X.org site."

[deton24]

The tool has been released with source codes:
http://www.ctpax-x.org/?goto=files&show=161

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