Help extracting music from OLD PC games by arrlson at 2:18 PM EDT on March 14, 2018
Hi everyone!

I need help with extracting music from these -old- games. I uploaded them so that anybody can examine their contents.

The games come in both installers and files. For 'Halflight', I set compatibility to windows XP for it to be run without too much flicker.

I used the video game toolbox tool to search for music in -what I think- the relevant files, but the program didn't extract anything. Namely, those files are: HL_MUSIC.DAT (from 'halflight'), opening.gwm, song1.gwm, song2.gwm (from 'adagio').

I would appreciate if someone can help in extracting the music from these games, preferably not through audio capture. Thank you.
by arrlson at 10:39 AM EDT on March 18, 2018
Has anybody had success extracting the music data? How can I play the files without extracting?
by arrlson at 3:35 AM EDT on May 11, 2018
Hi !
The .gwm files were .ogg files XOR'ed with [5D] bytes.
It would be nice if VGM toolbox included some XOR operator -it's part of the data extraction.
I still cannot make clue with the HL_MUSIC.DAT file -I will continue researching.
by bnnm at 6:32 AM EDT on May 12, 2018
I could add .gwm to vgmstream but your link was dead so I DL'd the original installers.

Adagio v3.03 had plain .ogg, here. Which version use .gwd?

Halflight .dat seem encrypted.
by arrlson at 2:49 AM EDT on May 15, 2018
I'm sorry for the original misinterpretation (and for the delay!). I named "adagio" just to shorten names.
The proper game is "adagio cloudburst demo", which I upload inside the archive. You can just un-7zip that installer to view its data files -the .gwd files among them.
I also upload the original installer for Halfligh anniversary edition. Additionally, I put "HL_MUSIC.dat2", I cannot remember, how on earth did this file appeared -maybe I was playing with allegro tools, an old installer I lost... I just cannot remember, that was some years ago.
Here is the link.

.gwm is just a dummy extension -as the data inside was just XOR'ed with [5D] bytes. Could have been any extension -I think extension does not matter for this type of files.
by arrlson at 3:05 PM EDT on May 21, 2018
Any success with the music?
by bnnm at 3:22 PM EDT on May 21, 2018
GWM is playable in the latest vgmstream, .dat as I said I think is encrypted and I can't help with that.
by arrlson at 4:05 PM EDT on May 21, 2018
Thank you, that was fast!

But I was wondering...Can you make XOR'ed files be read with vgmstream? I mean, if the file was just operated with bytes, then you could make ANY obfuscated file be read by vgmstream... unless that's is in the roadmap for this plugin, e.g. some files with arbitrary extension .a9a, they have music let's suppose, but hex viewing shows nothing known, but make vgmstream detect them as simply XOR'ed (or some other obfuscation process) .ogg or .mp3 files.
{This comment is moot -read EDIT below}

Is the other dat "HL_MUSIC.dat2" also encrypted? If yes, then there's nothing to do except hacking the (jgmod ?) libraries. This "HL_MUSIC.dat2" is in the new link posted.

Thank you for your work.


EDIT
{quoting myself}
It would be nice if VGM toolbox included some XOR operator -it's part of the data extraction.
Thank you. I forgot I asked for the feature in the first place ! ;~

edited 4:10 PM EDT May 21, 2018

edited 4:10 PM EDT May 21, 2018
by bnnm at 4:31 PM EDT on May 21, 2018
If you are asking if vgmstream can detect and play encrypted files, yeah it can, but support is done case by case. GWM encrypted files work now.

DAT2 seems to be compressed instead, and contain a bunch of subfiles, but similarly I can't help much with that either.

The author of VGMToolbox isn't around so no updates. But I guess there is some util to unXOR files somewhere already if you really need it.


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