The House of the Dead - Sega Saturn - .tad audio files by egregiousguy at 5:37 PM EDT on July 20, 2021
Hi everyone, was wondering if anyone was familiar with Sega Saturn audio formats and can help me out with this one. This comes from The House of the Dead and it appears that the music tracks are stored in the cdimage.elf file (which I extracted using the TOC and hashed filenames). The game also has CD audio tracks but they aren't used during game play and only used in music test mode. Anyhow, it appears to be a type of PCM audio (or ADPCM) at 22050Hz but that's as far as I've got. Header is [TPCMTADH] and sound data starts after [BODY][DATALEN]. Attached is a sample file. Thanks in advance!

Link
by bnnm at 4:09 PM EDT on July 21, 2021
Looks like a custom ADPCM codec somewhat like XA/PS-ADPCM, don't think any tool can play those.

Can you post more .tad (preferably all of them), and some main saturn executable (if known) or maybe an emu savestate?

I can make them playable in vgmstream but since I'm just guessing, the more stuff I have the better chance to make it accurate.
by egregiousguy at 5:34 PM EDT on July 21, 2021
I've added the rest of the .tad audio files. The link should be the same as the one above. I think the first byte of every 16 byte chunk could be related to an audio pan value as that was Sega's way of doing stereo on a mono track (I could be completely wrong about that).
by egregiousguy at 3:43 PM EDT on July 22, 2021
Added a couple of more files (nonono.tad/rbh) They both should be the same audio sample but one is the .tad file from the Saturn version and the other is from the PC version. Both the PC and SS versions were done by the same dev team. The PC version has a strange .rbh extension but the audio data appears to be 8-bit unsigned, mono, 11025Hz.
by bnnm at 6:58 PM EDT on July 23, 2021
.tad now works in vgmstream. Not sure if 100% accurate but sounds good enough I think.
by egregiousguy at 2:19 PM EDT on July 26, 2021
Sounds good enough for me too; thanks for your hard work! I'll report back if I come across any files that don't work.

Also, I know the vgmstream project is geared towards decoding streamed audio but, based on the complexity of the format, would you think that encoding back into this format is feasible?
by bnnm at 5:45 PM EDT on July 27, 2021
Codec is very similar to PS-ADPCM and related codecs, so probably some open source encoder out there could be modified to make these files I guess.

Can't really help since I only know how decoding works though.


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