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Uncompressed & Unfiltered Sonic 3 & Knuckles OST project.

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by TrooperManiac, May 8, 2022.

  1. ELS

    ELS

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    Right on time to make it an Origins mod?
     
  2. Yuzu

    Yuzu

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    This sounds fantastic!
     
  3. TrooperManiac

    TrooperManiac

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    This really isn't a bad idea.
     
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  4. Apparently Origins uses CRIWare audio files, but in some encrypted format; figure out how to decrypt it (A.K.A. reverse-engineer the code that encrypts it), and any editor for CRIWare audio would work.
     
  5. TrooperManiac

    TrooperManiac

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    It's a good thing I have 9 years experience. I'm a dev named Blah11 for UCGO Icarus Server when we had it running. "A Gundam based MMORPG".

    OK I already decompiled the file and was able to extract the raw files however they SEEM proprietary at the moment. They are in .DAT format and don't have an identifiable header. What do you mean by CRIWare audio files? I don't see software for that anywhere.

    *edit OK I see how they are encrypted now. Seems like we need to decode the hex key. I PROBABLY could brute force it.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 23, 2022
  6. ELS

    ELS

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    From what I hear, the whole game could benefit from music mods across the board.
     
  7. TrooperManiac

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    Never mind I completely reverse engineered it. It wasnt hard. I THINK I can make a mod. The music files are in .HCA format.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2022

  8. Breaking News:
    "Sonic Modders Mod Back in Original Sonic 3 Songs After Poor Reception to New Tracks"
     
  9. TrooperManiac

    TrooperManiac

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    all I need to do is figure out how to make .HCA sound files and it will be complete "MAYBE" as far as I can see thats the only thing im hung up on because I can convert back into the file type the game can read from

    Just to let you all know I haven't even opened up the game yet and just heard carnival night zone..... Im full disappoint.
     
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  10. I hope you'll be releasing a FLAC bundle of these tracks when you're all done. You've done a really wonderful job with these!
     
  11. TrooperManiac

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    I figured out how to convert .WAV into .HCA now however I'm stuck on what is seemingly the last part which is compiling new archives. I can however make the pointer file ".ACB" contain one new track however I have not been able to test it yet. I would need to figure out now how to compile .AWBs. decompression was easy. Compression is the difficult part.
     
  12. Turbohog

    Turbohog

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    If you're not already aware, it seems like the folks in the Retro Engine Modding Discord have figured this out. I'd recommend looking there for more information.
     
  13. TrooperManiac

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    Thanks for the heads up. This wasn't hard to reverse engineer but as a person with little free time to spare this was a bit rough.
     
  14. Shoemanbundy

    Shoemanbundy

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    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure all tracks are playing at the incorrect tempo. Everything seems to be slower than the originals. At first I thought all tracks were sharing the same BPM through some sort of mishap in rendering, but I can't tell for certain.
     
  15. TrooperManiac

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    this was recorded live from a Genesis. Only change is its playing the music and not rendering so that the Genesis's cpu wont process the track "this can control things like BPM". If I were to play the audio through the select screen, internal wire interference would have hindered the oscilloscope's ability to record what I needed clearly. "Mine is not an expensive one".

    Side note: I am done uploading all the S3&K music to soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/philip-mangione-1
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2022
  16. biggestsonicfan

    biggestsonicfan

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    ALWAYS Sonic the Fighters
    Did you ever decide if you were gonna pick up a Mega Blaster 2 or not? I am curious!
     

  17. These really came out INCREDIBLE! Sadly SoundCloud compresses uploaded audio to 128kbps -- any chance you'll release these in uncompressed formats elsewhere? Even a google drive upload or megaupload would be phenomenal.

    Sorry to ask a second time, I'm just really hoping to get a nice hi fi release of these fantastic remastered tracks.
     
  18. rata

    rata

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    Are these played at 50Hz? The music seems slower, despite sounding great.
     
  19. nineko

    nineko

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    For the record, SoundCloud allows people to download the original (hopefully uncompressed) files if the uploader enables that option, though I'm not sure if that's the case here because I'm not interested into this project and thus I didn't try to visit that link.
     
  20. TrooperManiac

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    Noted. I'll release the original .WAV files soon. They are in 32bit floating point precision mode so you may need to download some codecs with older versions of windows.

    Also you have to remember that the Sega Genesis is what 30 years old? The raspy notes are not a soundcloud thing, it's actually played like that on original hardware.

    There's an explanation for that. So yes the BPM may be a bit off that's because sonic 3 runs on the genesis in an over clocked state. When I play the music files without the game booting you hear it in its original recorded form.

    Blue spheres is a pretty good example of what cpu frequency can do to game and music speed.

    I might but I technically don't need it anymore but it would be nice to have if I decide to do other games. I'm almost 100% able to do everything I need to do on original hardware that I'm able to do with some sort of synth.
     
    Last edited: Jun 27, 2022