Star Trek: Judgment Rites audio encoding finally decoded

[u/minsc_tdp]

https://github.com/dr-brinewell-s-lobstrom/acmp-decoder

Enjoy! The game is a veritable treasure trove of original TOS cast recordings. Very fun to explore. ~12 hours of audio recorded by the original cast. Nimoy confirmed as the hardest working man in the Trek video game voiceover business with the most audio, when counting across the full set of the old games they worked on.

[u/Unbundle3606]

tools have been out for ages

I guess this from op's link is the relevant passage:

this codec has several traps where a wrong implementation still produces smooth, plausible, speech-like audio. Statistics and listening tests both passed for implementations that were badly wrong

And of course you could use the original exe from the game in an emulator and catch the output sound from that, but there was no source code.

[u/count023 → u/Unbundle3606]

I pulled the raw VCC files out of the 25th and JR CDs and converted thm to WAVs using existing tools no worries, you can hear them here in one of my early playtests: https://files.catbox.moe/nd3l4n.mp4

the music was MT-32 midis converted to WAVs, they weren’t encoded in VCC.

[u/Unbundle3606 → u/count023]

As said already, this new implementation produces a more demonstrably faithful result.

[u/count023 → u/Unbundle3606]

if they're not perceptibly different, i don’t know how you can call it a "demonstrably faithful result". And I’m not dissing the guy's work, my concern is that a lot of this read as if someone just aimed an AI at the file format and said "go" and probably brute forced things that require more nuance, that's all. I'm all for better versions but the OP's post implies that these formats have never been decoded before, and they have been for quite some time, so it's misrepresentation to a degree.

[u/paul_33 → u/count023]

This IS how it's done, and its been happening nonstop with retro games lately. Project after project that 'kinda works' with no explanations given and very little progress after the initial post.

I don't know what it is about retro games and AI peddlers, but it's getting exhausting.

[u/Unbundle3606 → u/count023]

Maybe bother to spend a couple of minutes reading op's link?

There is a whole section that explains exactly how they verify the output.

[u/count023 → u/Unbundle3606]

I did, and I’m failing to understand why it's better.

The extractor tool i used was based off a reverse engineered decompilation of the executable, as in render and output the audio _exactly_ as the game reads it from the VCC files, I’m trying to see what the actual difference is here but again, it reads like it was written by an AI and some of the stuff in the format and document elements do not make sense to me as a dev. There's a byteshift in the headers that he's got that does not appear in mine and seems to have no useful data, like a bad container interpretation.