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I finally got tired of staring angrily at my NTSC-U GameCube Sonic Gems Collection and decided to see what I could do about the Sonic CD soundtrack. I had a 920 proto around, so I figured I could rip the music and replace the US version in Gems with that. The short version is that it worked; for posterity I'll describe the process below, but first I'd like some advice on a smallish problem I'm having, if possible.

After ripping the music and encoding it at 32000Hz (what Gems uses), and adding the remaining PCM tracks, my music file is about 1MB larger than the one in soniccdu.cvm (the disc-image within Gems). Now, I know I could just resample something lower, but I'd rather not, so at the moment I just have tracks 2 ("Unused Warp Sound") and 27 ("Time Attack Menu") dummied out. My question is whether 34 ("Toot Toot") or maybe 35 ("Cosmic Eternity") would be better choices to cut. I know the game doesn't use these for the videos, but are they ever used elsewhere besides the sound test? If not, dropping one of these seems like the best option, obviously.

Thanks for any advice.

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Getting back to the practicals, here's what I actually did. After dumping the disc (used CleanRip on a Wii), I used GameCube Rebuilder to dig through the ISO. GC-Tool, GameCube Explorer or any of the other million similar tools should also be fine. Under /soniccd is soniccdu.cvm, the image with all the SCD data, including music. I extracted this, then explored it using an ISO tool called Apache3 (not that Apache) by PixCreations. BGM_US.AFS is an archive of all the music, which I extracted using hcs's lafs. From this, bgm_02.adx to bgm_35.adx are the US CD soundtrack, and bgm_36.adx to bgm_42.adx are the PCM "past" tracks. I kept those PCM tracks around since they're already correct, and trashed the rest.

Next, I started coming at it from the opposite direction, ripping the 920 CDDA to (44100Hz) WAV using Exact Audio Copy. I then batch downsampled my WAVs to 32000Hz using the free version of Switch, and encoded them to ADX with CRI's official cmd-line encoder, adxencd. I tried to bundle them into an AFS with their afslnk tool, but the version I found was in Japanese and I couldn't figure out how to get it to build the file with internal filenames intact. Instead, I ended up using AFS Explorer, a GUI tool designed for messing with the Pro Evo Soccer games. This allows you to open the stock BGM_US.AFS and import your stuff over it, and it will rebuild the file at the same time, keeping it as small as possible. (Before this step, I also replaced a couple of the ADXs with 0-byte dummies.)

With my AFS ready, I tried to reinsert it to soniccdu.cvm with Apache3, but it kept crashing on every attempt, so I gave up and just did it by hand with a hex editor—BGM_US.AFS begins at 0x43800 in soniccdu.cvm, I simply pasted my file over it. Then I reinserted my modified soniccdu.cvm into my Gems Collection ISO, and from there it's just whatever method you usually use to run GameCube ISOs. You'll probably also want to use the Action Replay code to switch to the original audio for the cutscenes—incidentally, does anyone know a way to hardcode this?—but other than that, you've now got a Sonic Gems Collection with original Sonic CD audio. Hopefully, that'll interest someone.

Hey all. I was just wondering, what is it about water levels that makes them unable to be played in splitscreen? I can guess that the water system would screw up (players ending up underwater when they're not supposed to be), but I was just wondering if it's really anything so serious. Would a save state hack get you into a water stage in splitscreen? How about if you hacked a save state to play in splitscreen and removed the water, too? Would that work? Thanks.

[EDIT]Hey, I'm Alpha Prime! I sound like a Transformer, now![/EDIT]

Hey. Not to alarm anyone, but I just plain don't recognise #90 on Sonic 2 Beta. It sounds remotely like the Sandopolis Zone's music, and I was wondering whether the speculation is that it was intended for Dust Hill Zone? Of course, it could just be some track I've forgotten, so if it is, tell me I'm an idiot and we'll move on .

Sorry about the topic name, I couldn't think of anything that would get your attention without actually promising anything. I found this page, where save states of all these stages are available:

Wood Zone Act 2
Mrr Aol Zone
Meraolodhi Zone
A tails box in a messed Emerald Hill.
EXCLUSIVE! Genocide City Zone
EXCLUSIVE! Genocide City Zone Act 2
EXCLUSIVE! Death Egg Zone Act 1
EXCLUSIVE! Death Egg Zone Act 2
Wing Water Zone(Yellow Sonic)
Demo Select!

Now I don't claim these are real, please view them yourself, and don't blame me if they are false. I've tested only the Wood Zone one, and when it worked, I came straight here.

Well, what do you think?

[EDIT]I just died, and I ended up at another stage. I think he might have changed the palletes and some of the graphic locations, and when you die, the system reloads the correct palletes. If I'm right, sorry about the false alarm.

Also, I unzipped them all, renamed them, and added them to one zip, for easier use. The zip is here.[/EDIT]