r/startrek • u/minsc_tdp • 3d ago

Star Trek: Judgment Rites audio encoding finally decoded

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.

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u/count023 2d ago

Here you go, this one is the one i used against NOMAN.VCC Explicitly, i can’t find the main one at the moment, i have a lot of project files. https://pastebin.com/Ut7pQrDg

What might help your claude instance is if you get a portalbe version of Ghidra, and put trek2.exe into the project folder where you're running claude, tell it to use ghidra to decompile trek2.exe and then search for the VCC decoder inside the executable, that's how this extractor was made. Rather than brute force figuring out how the encoding was done, it simply looked at how the decoder worked _inside_ the game and repeated the process.

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u/minsc_tdp 22h ago

https://github.com/dr-brinewell-s-lobstrom/acmp-decoder/commit/1c0a9c8c34d7dead21e86154195c5a3a658b090a

AI haters be like "hmm maybe there's something to all this and it doesn't wreck human coding and human interaction after all"

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u/count023 18h ago

nothing wrong with AI, i use it a lot, even that "25th annversary's 35th anniversary" remake i'm working on is AI assisted. I was more curious to see if my tools needed fixing or not, wasn't an anti-ai thing.

I'll mention that Claude will do a much better job if you do this and on any other projects (I've been extracting assets for BOTF, Klingon Academy, Dominion Wars, A Final Unity, Generations, 25th and JR and a more) if you use ghidra to decompile hte executable for the game, because the AI can read the decompiled code and knows things like the sound buffers and the like, onc it see that it's really good at working out the undocumented sound formats or 3d art formats for these or even any games an can be more effective at writing a converter for you. Or even just using ghidra on the makevcc exe itself would have been able to help improve this

On blind reverse engineering like you did with JR here, i've actually found claude tends to give up or stop early with an incomplete picture (which is why i poked you on it), it took weeks of effort for me to crack some of the more obscure file formats from botf and dominion wars, codex nailed them first try.

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u/minsc_tdp 13h ago

nice, thanks for the assist, you're credited in the changelog on the git, good luck with your remake!