Realms Of The Haunting (Supported?)

Hey there,

I'm trying to access the audio files (mainly the speech files) of the old gremlin interactive game 'realms of the haunting'. I was pleased to find that XWE supports this game and I was able to locate the files in question and open them (in the dat files of the game), where XWE outputs them as .wav.

The problem I'm having is that the sounds are very static/garbled, so much so, as the words of the speech are almost completely blocked out by the static. Seeing as XWE supports the game I was wondering if this problem could be helped (maybe by a specific codec I'm unaware of?)

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Hey,

The sound files in ROTH are in WAV format, but they use a special compression. I found documentation for it back the somewhere (you can Google "IMA-ADPCM decompression), but it never worked. Or rather, it didn't work right, I could never figure out why.

The only thing I can suggest is this: view them as RAW entries and save them (so the entries get exported "as is" without XWE trying to interpret them). Then try to open them with some sound editor that understands the compression (SoundForge 7.0 doesn't). Sorry :-(

You can actually install the IMA ADPCM codec by installing it via hardware manager and selecting mmsystem.inf in the system32 directory (I tried it with windows sound editor (exporting the file with xwe), but it didn't work)

I don't know if this will help decoding them http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Category:Game_Formats

I think it may come under either Interplay or Gremlin format, but I don't know.

Thanks guys, tried a wave editor that detects them (uncompressed) but I'm having the same garbled problems. I'll keep looking and post something if I find it, but I'm doubtfull to say the least...

one way to do it is play it through VDMSound and save the sound output to wave file.

Yeah, but I would prefer not having to play the whole game to access all the speech file. The most frustrating is that you can access the files, just can't decompress them right :/

What I said in the previous post was incorrect. I confused the ROTH sound files with another supported game.

At this moment I don't know what format the ROTH sound files are. They are in a WAV container, but they use compression 42 (0x2A), for which I can't find documentation anywhere. The data is not even compressed. Previously XWE just displayed the sound data "as is", and even then the speech could be heard. If it were compressed, it would be a garbled mess.

What we need to figure out is what those bytes mean. It's trial and error. I tried several things, but haven't figured it out. The bytes are weird in the sense that they don't go "up and down" like usual wave data bytes do, but rather "stay on one side". One thing that did improve a bit was when I used the lowest bit to the most significant position. Grab the beta, that's how I left it. It's still very noisy, but you can hear the speech much better. That's where I'm stuck, unless someone knows what those bytes mean, I think it's hopeless.

Thanks, the beta is somewhat better indeed, a very odd format, If you look at the header you can also see that it's FFIR, the exact oposite of 'RIFF'.

stupid question, but maybe it is something to do with endianess?

Yeah, several other games used FFIR instead of RIFF, they are both the same format.

The data looks to be single bytes, so there's no question about big/little endian.

Hi every one.

I'm trying to rip some of the sprites from Realms of the Haunting but when I load up the .DAT files the imegas are garbled on the left side. any one know how to fix this? I know there was one guy who managed to extract the textrues but he only did the textures not the sprites.

Any help would be apresiated.

I have been working on figuring out ROTHs wav file sample encoding and discovered they are in Creative 8bit adpcm format (or at least close to it)

The decoder algorithm is here: http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Creative_8_bits_ADPCM

I wrote a small converter program to dump a raw pcm file using the above algorithm, the result is here, not perfect but its a start