Ripping music (and sounds) from Creative Wonders PC games by JacintaB19 at 9:02 PM EDT on May 15, 2020
I'm trying to get the music and sounds from PC games made by Creative Wonders. This also includes the game demos as well.
Some games (like the Sesame Street ones) have the sounds and music as WAV or AVI files, while others (Schoolhouse Rock, Madeline, ABC World Reference, etc) have the music stored in files. How can I get them? Any help needed would be nice.
As with any other game you requested so far, a good start is to upload the file(s) which supposedly contain the data you wish to extract. If we don't know the format we need some file(s) to examine.
"Around the World" and "Peter Pan" share the same .RSC file types, which can easily be extracted using VGM Toolbox but the extracted files are compressed with some (unknown?) method! If you still want to extract them go to VGM Toolbox's Virtual File System extractor and use the following configuration:
Header size is at offset 27 and has size of 4 and byte order is Little Endian File records begin at offset 8 and have size 23 File offset is at offset 19 and has size 4 and byte order is Little Endian Use file offsets to determine file lengths Filename is included in VFS Filename is included in the individual file record at offset 0 Has static size 15
"Grammar Rock" is a mess. The .DIR files are tag-based with kinda complex structure. Sounds are stored in a custom format. I'm not going to write a fully functional parser for these files, which could take ages and is simply not worth the effort. I wrote a simpler converter instead, which only scans for the signature of one specific tag. This can lead to the extraction of some garbage WAV files (loud noise!) or skipping extraction of correct WAV files. You have to live with that limitation at the moment until someone reverse engineered that format further. Put the EXE and all the .DIR files you want to extract in the same directory and run the EXE.
The "Madeline" stuff is unclear. Some games have data directly embedded into their EXE, which makes it complicated to extract. There's no easy way to automate the process for this kind of stuff (except when standard files are embedded). In the "MATE" directory are some .MAV files which seem to be a custom video format with interleaved audio data between the frames. I haven't spend too much time dissecting those files because the structure is even more complex than .DIR files, so no extraction at the moment.
I think I'll do the CON files first, found in the "getset" ISO. They're not super complicated but still kinda cluttered. They contain sound in at least 2 different types, the first one is some proprietary (of course) format which needs demuxing because it's interleaved with some dialog animation control chunks which have to be cut out to get a correct stream. The other type are standard WAV files which can be ripped by VGM toolbox.
EDIT: Download CON2WAVE.EXE, put it in the same directory as all the CON files and run the EXE.
EDIT 2: The "letters" ISO contains lots of CWW files which is a video format with audio chunks between the frames. Thankfully it's simpler than CON files and extracting/concatenating the audio chunks is relatively straightforward. As always, download a tool I purposefully named CWW2WAV.EXE and put it in the same directories as the CWW files, then run it.
edited 2:46 PM EDT May 31, 2020
Mav files by Puterboy1 at 5:59 PM EDT on May 31, 2020
What about the sound files from the Madeline games? Any solution to those?
Not yet, I'm working on it. MAV files are a bit more tricky and sometimes I have other stuff to do than reverse engineering obscure file formats. Just wait until it's done.
I finally reverse engineered the MAV format enough to be able to extract the audio chunks. Download the MAV2WAV converter, put it in the same directories (there are many) as the MAV files and run it.
EDIT: I just noticed there are at least 2 different types of MAV files! This is ONLY for the "thinking games" and not for the "European adventures" ISO.
EDIT2: Upon further inspection I found out that both formats are actually identical but the file headers for the "European adventures" format are messed up and contain garbage. I updated the converter accordingly. It's now able to extract both types.
Strange. So far every file I uploaded was always visible/accessible to anyone. Try downloading it again.
As for "Magnificent Puppet Show": I don't know? I only work with folders provided by the ISOs. There is a "MADELINE" folder which contains the MAV files and another folder named "MADTG". I don't know which is which because I do not install anything. I just extract all ISOs and work with the files directly.
EDIT: oh, now I see! Yes, the converter is only for "Puppet Show" and "European Adventures" then. I mistakenly said in my last post it's for "Thinking Games" but I was wrong. Thinking games have no single file format but mostly embedded stuff.
There might still be incompatibilities all over the place because the more ISOs I have to dissect the more stuff I discover about those file formats. The current versions of the 4 tools I created so far work "most of the time" but not always because I did not invest too much time into complete reverse engineering. It will take considerably more time for it to be more compatible with every file there is. Also, the tools do zero sanity checks at the moment so if a file has some unknown stuff going on some undefined program behavior can occur.
In one of the last ISOs I discovered two more variants of the DIR file type (DXR and CXT) which has stereo samples, something I did not take into consideration until now. Also, CON files which I presumed only had PCM audio, also contain ADPCM compression which is not yet supported etc [...]
Madeline also has yet another Video-like format (AVC) which seems to be similar to MAV but with different header or whatever.
I updated CON2WAV to support the "baby_me" ISO (whatever the real game name might be). It's the only game so far that uses 4-bit ADPCM samples. As far as I can tell, the converter now supports every game that uses CON files. I'm not going to listen to 10000+ sounds to see if everything works.
Sesame Street: The 3 Grouchketeers Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17uh3iwpMzcpcORtK5F_lQfJl4-vz3iU_/view?usp=sharing
Sesame Street: Elmo Through The Looking Glass Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OYahoTNyrXgOvROSSSwm9GjF5Sfzh84T/view?usp=sharing
Madeline: Rainy Day Activities Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hx7ScyBU1FIAo2GvUMWlNPY-9H1j2O1n/view?usp=sharing
Schoolhouse Rock: Math Rock Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tMjyxDIwbP-eQQbZSzOGwXHaZQHuPVcm/view?usp=sharing
Schoolhouse Rock: Exploration Station Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1flQ4TyB1te8grdLcLWsmVi7svSV1tMat/view?usp=sharing
ABC World Reference: 3D Atlas 97 and 98 Link 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GLLA4Qsa1AK0VR29V480j99SZHkepJ29/view?usp=sharing Link 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wPG1wlC-x49psAxiJ3G70pBR-ZY-MdlX/view?usp=sharing
ABC World Reference: Wide World Of Animals Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Xmo2_H6CHyKxHXjSa3tF4GGMtVrYHTSY/view?usp=sharing
The "Atlas" ISOs only have standard files like WAV and AVI. I can't see a whole lot of hidden stuff except the spoken names of countries in the "postcard" folder of the "3D Atlas 98" ISO, which are standard WAV files inside CHK files. What exactly is the problem with these two?
As for all the others: all it comes down to are basically 4 archive/container formats (CON, CWW, MAV and DIR) where DIR has a few more deviations which are basically identical just with different extension (DXR, CXT). These are actually Adobe Director files. They store stuff in confusing ways which leads to imperfect extraction.
CON files seem to work quite well as of now so I think I'm going to continue with CWW or DIR which work already but not quite perfect.
"To find what I want?" I want nothing, especially not more ISOs. I already have plenty of ISOs to work with. You can test every game that uses CON files by you own. Only if something's not working you can report it here. In the meantime I'll continue to "refine" the other formats – can take a while though.