Previous Page | Next Page

by Nicknine at 3:15 PM EDT on July 15, 2018
@Koto - This is 5.1 surround audio, so it's not like the music. Typically for cutscene audio, the track has SFX, voices and music all mixed together so you can't separate them.
BTW, it also has non-standard channel order: FL, FR, BL, BR, FC, LFE
Standard Dolby Digital order expected by most audio players: FL, FR, FC, LFE, BL, BR

edited 3:31 PM EDT July 15, 2018
by Nicknine at 4:22 PM EDT on July 15, 2018
@bnnm - I've looked at audio chunks from NFS: Rivals on PC and most of them have varying data before SPS header. It often starts with 0x00010000 but can also be something completely different.
Looking at all this, I really think supporting raw Frostbite audio chunks is not practical, they're clearly not meant to be used in raw form. I suggest dropping it and re-doing existing Frostbite rips using Frankelstner's Python dumper scripts and my SPS Extractor scripts. This way you can get proper SPS files with proper names and paths. Like this.

FB2 Sb/Toc Dumper
FB2 SPS Extractor
FB3 Sb/Toc Dumper
FB3 SPS Extractor

edited 4:30 PM EDT July 15, 2018
by bxaimc at 5:24 PM EDT on July 15, 2018
Oh hey, this looks neat. Wonder if it’ll work on some PS4 stuff I have around.
by Nicknine at 5:29 PM EDT on July 15, 2018
Well, the creator did apparently test his scripts with console versions so it should be fine. I tried it on PS3 version of NFS: The Run and it worked. Didn't work on X360 version, though. I've looked at the files with hex editor and bundles look weird, I think they might be encrypted. No clue if other Frostbite games are like that as well.

edited 5:38 PM EDT July 15, 2018
by Ultrafighter at 5:25 AM EDT on July 16, 2018
@Bnnm - thanks for this update man, SVGs work as a charm now!

@Nicknine - I don't really know if NFS: The Run for X360 uses encrypted bundles or not but that version is definitely rippable, Alpha23 ripped it quite some time ago.

Later!

Edit: What a surprise, his rip is even backed up here! Anyway it seems he used this but much older and shorter version.

Edit #2: Sorry for double post, I was intending to add contents of my next post to this one but mistakenly left a new message instead. It's not such a huge offense, is it?

edited 9:36 AM EDT July 16, 2018
by Ultrafighter at 9:32 AM EDT on July 16, 2018
Hi Bnnm and Nicknine, it'd be great if you're able to help me with 2 more EA titles: Skate for X360 & NASCAR 06 for Xbox.

The latter uses exclusively DATs without HDR companions (maybe devs spliced pairs of DAT/HDR files and HDRs are hidden within DATs now? That's just a wild guess though) but actual sound formats seem pretty common. For example NMUSIC.DAT stores tracks with SCHL headers while NSOUND.DAT holds loads of SNGs (those streams with SCHL identifier may have many extensions but I prefer *.sng), BNKs (those start with "BNKL" bytes), ABKs (ABKC header) and theoretically even more formats, that's why I'd truly appreciate any help with proper unpacking of that specific archive.
Also there's PRMOVIES.DAT (215 MB) accompanied by MOVIES.DAT (270 MB), I was expecting to find MPC, VP6 or at least TGQ videos (MPCh, MVHD & 1SNh headers respectively) there but both bigfiles don't seem to contain anything like that. I initially presumed that NASCAR 06 utilizes some very special type of movie with a MADk identifier, this theory doesn't look too good now: these "MADk" strings pop up way too frequently to really mark start of another vid (unless they're super-small & without sound). I wonder what these mad strings can actually mean and if PRMOVIES.DAT and/or MOVIES.DAT even contain any video data...

Skate apparently uses quite old scheme - MUS banks along with MPFs and I thought that Bnnm's ea_mus_sns_snr_type1.bms would work nicely but it's not the case, I got "incomplete input file" error on all *.mus files. Can the script be tweaked so that it supports the game in question or is it a call for a completely different BMS? I sure hope it's just a matter of a small fix / tiny edit and the evil forces @EA HQ changed their proprietary banks very little this time.
Or should I use ea_multi_xma.exe for splitting / dividing this kind of MUSs? I'm not too sure how these *.mus_stream# dumped tracks should be dealt with (if we don't want to transmogrify them) but maybe that program is the right tool for the task at hand?

Thanks in advance for any assistance! Best regards!
by Nicknine at 12:48 PM EDT on July 16, 2018
@Ultrafighter - HDR/DAT format is used for speech.

These DAT files from Nascar 06 is some new file archive format I haven't seen before. No filenames, unfortunately. NSOUND.DAT contains ABK files (which I actually mostly figured out, stay tuned). There's also what looks like CSI/EVT/IDX/BIG file combo (used for storing speech in NFS games, maybe something else). MOVIES.DAT contains MAD video files.
Here's QuickBMS script for extracting these files:

EA DAT Extractor

MPF/MUS is actually a common format EA used for storing music in late 6th gen games. It was also modified in 2007 when EA moved to the new sound system with SNR/SNS, the script you used is designed for that particular version. I've looked into the files and the script does work if you switch it to big endian like advised in the comments since you're dealing with X360 files. Although it looks like the number of files is always little endian so move "endian big" line after "get FILES short"

As for NFS: The Run, you can still extract chunk files from superbundles but without ebx files from bundles, you can't get proper names and other information for each sound file.

edited 8:06 PM EDT July 16, 2018
by Ultrafighter at 8:40 AM EDT on July 17, 2018
One can't underestimate qualities of your NASCAR script Nicknine, it works great! I've got a few questions though, they're all about various formats found in those DAT bigfiles.

First of all I'm wondering if ABKs (and that weird combo file too) are supposed to contain audio streams? I'm only somewhat familiar with BNKs so that I'm unsure if some files with different extensions can store sounds too.

Also what would you call the best option for checking out contents of those *.bnk files? VGMstream doesn't work too good on this occasion, it founds lots of subsongs with unknown codec/specs and even those which have duration value / frequency & channels still don't play properly, there're lots of static and tracks seem to last less than their play-length suggests (and they mostly have insane bitrate values specified in track properties).
Does it sound like those SSX 3 banks which required some manual adjustments to make them play? Or can they be implemented to plugin as-is? Probably this last question has to be addressed to Bnnm.

As for MAD files - were they used in other VGs? XentaxWiki has entries for some EA formats but specification for "MADk" isn't there.
Do MAD vids look like they have any sound data in them, not just video frames? On a related note, some ASFs from NSOUND.DAT might be tracks for movies that are stored separately.

Finally big thanks for this Skate hint, I made both changes you suggested in Bnnm's BMS and all extracts perfectly now! There're numerous 6ch XMA2 streams however, they sound fine in the beginning but quite weird later on; this should be some FFMPEG playback bug... I guess.

Cheers guys, your work's highly appreciated!

edited 8:47 AM EDT July 17, 2018
by Nicknine at 11:17 AM EDT on July 17, 2018
ABKs have normal and streamed variants. Normal one actually contains BNK file embedded into it while streamed one is paired up with AST file. Don't know what BNK files you're talking about, I haven't seen any in the samples you gave me.
MAD video format does sound familiar, I think I've either seen it in another game or read about it. I can't tell anything more than that, you'll have to look it up.

edited 11:18 AM EDT July 17, 2018
by Ultrafighter at 12:31 PM EDT on July 18, 2018
All *.bnk come from NSOUND.DAT, there're 15 such files in total and every one has some bugs / errors in playback. You can grab them all here.

For example all subsongs from NSOUND_37.bnk or NSOUND_41.bnk seem to be recognized by VGMstream but they still don't play right: there're lots of static, especially in beginning.
If we take NSOUND_30.bnk & NSOUND_36.bnk we'll see that numerous subsongs have no length, bitrate & stuff; could those unplayables use some different codec, not EA-XA ADPCM? Of course I can only speculate but it doesn't seem to be a bad theory.

Bye!

Previous Page | Next Page
Go to Page 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270

Search this thread

Show all threads

Reply to this thread:

User Name Tags:

bold: [b]bold[/b]
italics: [i]italics[/i]
emphasis: [em]emphasis[/em]
underline: [u]underline[/u]
small: [small]small[/small]
Link: [url=http://www.google.com]Link[/url]

[img=https://www.hcs64.com/images/mm1.png]
Password
Subject
Message

HCS Forum Index
Halley's Comet Software
forum source