Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Herm the Germ - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Ever since experiencing it over on Ubuntu, MPlayer's been my media player of choice as it doesn't necessarily use a pesky GUI and generally doesn't require too many resources even in a Windows port, which is quite good as my PC isn't all that fresh. (at present, playin' an average MP3, MPlayer uses up 0.4 % of my CPU (an AMD Duron 1.6 GHz ) and 7 MB in RAM (out of 1024 MB DDR1 RAM))
The only exception to that is for MIDIs, obviously, since MPlayer doesn't support those (I use Timidity++ for that, instead, but, anyway, getting off-topic)

Only two nitpicks came up for me with MPlayer as of the release of a certain 496-MP3-files-strong archive not too long ago

One being that, at the end of an MP3, the last ~1 Second or so is cut off as it skips over to the next track. This only happens if output is put through Direct Sound. If I set MPlayer to put it straight through the Win32-Audio-Mapper, it instead plays that extra second -- but playing music this way proves to a problem of it's own, as the music gets quite laggy if I so much as scroll through a large page in Firefox, for example.
Is there any sort of known fix for this sorta thing?

Additionally, I am curious if there's any sort of equivalent to the infamous "in_vgmstream" Plugin to MPlayer, or something comparable. It sounds like something I might have a use for in the future and I'd rather not have to get a whole additional player just for those advantages.

Google said "Nope" on both, but then, it's not all-knowing, so, I thought I'd try my luck with the tech-wizards over here : D

Guys, I could use some help once more and you guys are pretty much there best there is with that sorta stuff.

Simply put, for something I am doing on a different forum, I need to embed a LOT of pictures (270 or so at present, with new ones being churned out ever so often). Some of them are animated and some of those are quite heavy (meaning sized over 1 MB or so).

I've tried a lot of image hosts for this project.

At first, I used minus.com, which works well enough, but it turns out some people can't see pictures from there for no apparent reason.

So I switched to imagehost.org, which worked very much in my favor for the most part, until recently (more on that later). Only problem was that animated gifs couldn't be larger than a Megabyte in size, but, that's what I relied upon freeimagehosting.net and hostfile.org for.

Recently, hostfile failed in the image (and general file) hosting regard for no apparent reason whatosever. No problem, I thought, still got freeimagehosting. But those servers are extreeeeeeemely slow, which obviosuly is kinda not favorable given the size of the .gif's.

Now, apparently, imagehost.org changed all their image-embed URLs to redirect to a HTML-page with new tags for the image. Which is complete bullshit, of course, as that disables the ability to actually embed those images.

Does anyone of you geniuses here know a more reliable, free image host that doesn't randomly generate problems like this? D:

So, I'm trying to figure out aforementioned format, found (so far solely) in "All Kamen Rider: Rider Generation" for Nintendo DS. It's a sprite-collection, essentially, but it's different from regular Nintendo DS sprite format. If anyone could help me figure this out and make things more convenient than "shift pixels constantly in CrystalTile to be able to rip anything" that would be much appreciated and I'd basically love you forever (platonically, anywho ).

Here's what I have figured out so far (as per usual, any unprofessional terminology can be attributed to me being a n00blet with these things 8D ) :

Byte (80)
WORD (varies from file to file, unknown purpose)
Byte (0)
WORD (20)
WORD (0)
Byte (60)
WORD (varies from file to file, identical to the variable one above)
Byte (0)
DWORD (0)
WORD (4)
WORD (varies)
WORD (1)
QUAD (0)

After that follows 512 bytes in Palette data. This palette data can be inserted into any standard Nintendo DS NCLR-Palette file, meaning it's essentially the same format.

Following that is a block of data which I have not determined a purpose for yet. The block varies in size from file to file, but usually has data in the format "WORD (variable), WORD (0)." Could be some kind of address-lookup-table?

Past that block of data begins sprite data, from what I can gather. Each sprite graphic has some header of it's own.

WORD (width)
WORD (height)
WORD (varies, unknown purpose)
WORD (varies, unknown purpose)
WORD (size in byte)
WORD (0)

Then follows the actual sprite-data, and after that, the next file until it's all done.

So, uh… can anyone here pretty please help me with this, maybe? xD; I know it's an obscure game and all that, but, yeah, I would really like to know stuff here. D:
If it helps, here be an example file

Like so.

Specifically, the last 3 columns to the right are on the left whenever I paste any graphic data (for example Screenshots) into GIMP. Those same three columns, now situated on the left, are shifted up by one Pixel and on the very bottom left corner, there's three pixels, red, green and blue, for no obvious reason whatsoever.

What's the reason for this? Pasting into MS Paint and then from Paint into GIMP does not give me the same trobule.

For reference, I am currently using Windows XP Home Edition, SP3, 32-bit on an AMD Duron Applebred 1.6 GHz CPU with 1.0 GB DDR RAM and a GeForce 4 MX 440 with 64 MB RAM.

The interest in this is probably not too high, but nevertheless, here's what I do have in terms of information on the subject. Before doin' anythin' with those, be sure to make some back-ups.

PAC Files, as has been figured, are:

a) A format re-used from the PSO games
and
b) basically a bunch of PCM wave files, little endian, 16 bit, 22,050 Hz, mono, chained one after another with a bunch of headers to tell the game which sound is which.
The Heroes PAC format is a tad bit different, but nevertheless, the written-for-PSO tool PAC Manager version 0.4 can handle these files relatively well. Previous versions and the following version 0.5 cannot handle the Heroes PACs for various reasons, mostly since those versions are almost exclusively geared towards the actual PSO .pacs, complete with reference-addresses built-in that won't do no good with Heroes' files.

PAC Manager will give you a file list, labelled Sound 01-XX, depending on file-count. The first 10 files (at least in Bank0.pac) are Header data not usually found in PSO PACs. PAC Manager 0.4 erroneously reads these as 52-byte-long sound files each. Skipping past those, we got the actual sounds.
Using BlazeHedgehog's guide on how to listen to the sounds in the pack is a good way of figuring out which sound number is which.
It's a good idea to extract the sound you want to replace first.

The file you want to insert should be no longer than the original sound, as PAC Manager cannot expand the PAC-files. Hence it's a good idea to have the original out for size-comparison's sake.
The file you want to import must be a 22050 Hz 16-bit Mono PCM Wave-file.

If all went well, your sound is now in the .pac file. Remember to save the modified .pac, though.

Finally, you must do one change to the archive. Open and compare the .pac header of the modified file with the back-up file in a hex-editor and you'll see that there's stuff missing. This is likely due to, as established, PAC Manager assuming the Heroes .pac-header being 10 sound files instead of the file's header. This can be fixed by simply copying and pasting the first 352 bytes from the back-up into the modified file. Saving that, the sounds should now work flawlessly in the game.

If I explained anything in a dumbass, not-understandable way, do hit me with a heavy object and correct me.