Some info (and help requests) on batch-converting voice files from various PAC games

[AMockery]

So, because I have been blessed with the twin gifts of no life and obsessiveness, I've taken it upon myself to attempt to rip the voice files out of as many of my favorit games as possible so that I can use them in various places. The point-and-click games come immediately to mind because... well, there's so many awesome clips in them, really. Because I am also very lazy, the idea of going in and manually pulling each file I want to use out one-at-a-time is about as appealing to me as a road accident, so I've been spending probably more time than it would take to do that in figuring out ways to make the computer do that for me. I hope that what I've found out can serve as a cautionary tale to anyone as sad as I am trying to do this in the future.

 

-Scumrev2 will view pretty much anything from anywhere, however there's no batch processing in it what-so-ever, so for the purposes of this project I'm going to pretend like it doesn't exist.

 

-The resource file viewer for .bun files, while excelent and does exactly what it's designed to, isn't very useful in this case; it exports .imx files, which are the original ones, but as far as I can tell no player can play them.

 

-That leaves us with the various SCUMM compression tools in SCUMMVM. Scumm_SOU is unfortunately rather useless for this purpose because it names each file "tempfile.raw", then deletes it as soon as it's done.

 

-However, scumm_bun names each file according to it's title from within the bundle file, and saves them as PCM wave files. Of course, it still deletes them as soon as it doesn't need them anymore, so it's still useless, right? ...Well, no. That's actually really easy if you're using a modern OS: just set a temporary permission token on the directory you're using to extract the files to that says no program is allowed to delete anything there, run the compression utility, unset the token and delete the compressed files it generates. So, that's The Dig and the Curse of Monkey Island out of the way with almost no effort.

 

-So what about those games that use the monster.sou files (almost all of them)? That's actually really easy, too: a program called "Game Audio Player" http://www.fileplanet.com/164521/160000/fileinfo/Game-Audio-Player) makes it really easy: extract the .zip into anywhere, run the program, use "scan file" and open up the monster.sou of whatever game you want, then go to the playlist view and it will have each file nicely separated for you. Just select them all and tell it to convert everything to wav, select a directory, and get a coffee. The only problem is that the fiels inside have no titles, so you have to use the resource name instead, which means that they will all come out looking like resourceXXX.wav. Not a big deal but may become important later. So, that's: Day Of The Tentacle, Indiana Jones, Sam and Max, and Full Throttle all out of the way (am I missing any?) as well as--if this interests you--Sierra's Space Quests 4 and 6. Yeah, it opens those files too, uses the exact same method (though they're compressed using a different tool, of course).

 

However, at this point I'm stumped: I can batch convert all the Grim Fandango files to wav but they're still compressed with the VIMA codec, and hours (literally, hours) of searching has given me no way to either play them or convert them to PCM WAV, despite the fact that they are apparently like 2 bytes away from the IMA codec which I do know what to do with, and the decoder code is printed right on a wiki for anyone who knows how to program to use (a wide open category that includes: not me.) As for Escape from Monkey Island, I don't even know where to get started with WVC, which I assume is not WavePack, and while I'm sure the EMI resource viewer would do it I can't seem to find it (the link for it in the readme first post is dead, again, so might want to fix that). Haven't even tried the revamped Monkey Island 1 and 2 games, but suspect I'll run into similar problems.

 

Also, an I haven't really tried to do this yet, but I haven't come across anything that will hook in with the textfiles from the games and automatically rename the files to something more easily identifiable, like "neat.wav" for Bernard's exclamation of "neat!" in DOTT, just as a random example. As of now it's something like monster0534.wav which is less than helpful if you're trying to find any particular clip.

 

So, if anyone knows more about this stuff than I do, I'd really appreciate some suggestions on how to do this. Thanks in advance for any light someone might be able to shed on the situation.

[Benny]

EMI Viewer will decode the speech and will do it as batch. I've upload it for you here.

 

SCUMM Rev 2 is the only tool I know that decodes VIMA. Of course someone could just use the Residual source to hack a tool together to do it. If you're lucky someone will do that for you.

[AMockery]

The BB code for the URL to EMIViewer is messed up.

 

As for scumrev, yeah, it'd be nice, but I'm not holding my breath. Though I'm sure lots of people would find it quite useful, I have a feeling that if it was going to happen it would have by now. Honestly I might not even need a specific batch converter frontend; if I had a command line interface to the tool I could probably hack something together using a for loop like I did with Arkham Asylum yesterday.

[Benny]

Fixed it. When I said "the residual source" I was referring to this not ScummRev.

[AMockery]

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the clarification, hadn't noticed that.

 

Got the EMI viewer, thanks much--but I can't batch extract as wave. I can save as wave, and I can extract everything, but I can't figure out how to get it to convert everything at once. In any case, thanks for making the tool available again.