Need help with a H4M video plus some Star Fox Adventures stuff by koolaid at 12:45 AM EDT on August 17, 2013
Hey all.
I recently opened a topic over at TCRF about a kiosk version of Star Fox Adventures that was included in one of the interactive multi-game demo discs (july 2002). This version seems to date the final release by a few months, so it's a pretty neat find given it's history.
Anyway, immediately upon extracting the demo, I noticed a H4M video in the root directory titled "crap starfox.h4m". The file name just begs the question what it could be. But no matter what I tried, I can't get it to play and it doesn't seem like the game itself plays it at any point (I can't find references to Hudson's format anywhere else in the game). I tried using the H4M player dol file and it didn't work for me, and I tried to load the file by replacing the H4M in a few games (Bomberman Jetters and Kirby) but it would just not play the video and go back to whatever menu follows the video that normally plays. I tried using h4m_audio_decode but I get the error "expected nonzero audio srate and frame size". The video itself is a HVQM4 1.3 format. It's only present in this version of the game.
There are also some other odd files included in this version, but only this version. MPEG.bin is a a pretty big file, but it seems to be obfuscated or compressed in something since I don't know what format they would've likely used. Star Fox Adventures uses a combination of LZO and ZLIB for model files, but I can't tell what format they could've used for some of the files that aren't used as there's no header to note. TRACKS.bin is the same deal, afaik.
Another thing I wanted to note is that Star Fox Adventures would eventually use the MusyX sound engine for music and sfx playback. The game actually included the project, pool, sample directory, and sample data files used for MusyX. Unfortunately, as I've read the documentation for the format, they strip the original "non data" versions of the files of useless information and compress the data for use with the game itself. However, this version of the game includes a leftover directory of this conversion process (after the music composer converts their project into data and before the programmer makes use of it in their program). Inside the directory contains a header file of labels for the music and sound for two versions of the game, and converted project data. In the final version, they take all the converted data generated from MusyX's tools, remove the last letter from the file extension, and threw it in the 'audio' directory. The sequencing data, which would normally be left as individual files after conversion, would get thrown in 'midi.wad' - which doesn't appear to be compressed in anything. But this version of the game retains each music sequence data as an individual file. Again, these files are never used, but are leftovers of an early version of Star Fox Adventures (but not Dinosaur Planet, though - since it's evident that DP didn't use MusyX). Not that any of what I just said was important or useful, but I thought that maybe it would be worth pointing out.
I figured I'd mention some of this stuff besides the H4M video in case anyone with more knowledge of audio/video formats was interested in looking further into this version of the game. You'll find more information in the topic over at TCRF.