Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2) Audio Extraction by Sintelic at 12:18 AM EST on February 5, 2021
Hi, I've been trying to extract the PS2 version of MGS2's audio, I've looked up and down and have used Demux and Konami .DAT tool but to no avail. If anyone wants to try your hand I'll provide the .DAT file(s)
hi, the music of the ps2 versions of mgs2 (as well as zoe and zoe2) use an adapted version of the mgs1 sound driver sequence player. the data is found in STAGE.DAT in the various sdx files. you cannot use Solidus or any PC tools as the format differs, if you have the means to build software yourself check dat-extract_enc from https://github.com/Joy-Division/tools-mgs (no prebuilt executables as of now) to seperate the sdx files into their various parts you can use sdx-extract from https://github.com/Joy-Division/tools-zoe there is no ready to use player for the data currently, the parsers in tools-zoe for the various subfiles are kinda useless there currently is no ready to use tool for the streamed audio (as found in e.g. VOX.DAT), simply ripping should be possible with either psound or vgmtoolbox but might require tinkering since some are 5.1 instead of stereo
the reason the dat demuxer doesnt work is because it only supports MTAF streams which were used in mgs3 and mgs4
Thank you for such detail, I wouldn't mind going through all the trouble but is it known if the PS2 has better audio quality then the PC? I figured so since early 2000's Konami PC ports had far worse audio quality then the PlayStation 2.