MMFW/MMA/AIF music format (Furby: Big Fun in Furbyland by ImageBuilder)

[Catstorm]

Hello and greetings,

My friend and I are trying to decompress the music from the CD-ROM game Furby: Big Fun in Furbyland. We've tried the scripts from QuickBMS, especially the ones that work for other MMFW-based files that the ImageBuilder devs liked so much (Millionaire3 script), but with no luck. This is a serious compression conundrum.

All of the game's .AIF sounds are stored inside large MMFW-type files called "FurbySnd.MMA" and "FurbySd2.MMA". Trying to import them into Audacity as raw audio can get the voice sound files to decompress clearly, but not the actual music - which is audible, but drowned out by a wave of noise, no matter what settings are used.

These same files work perfectly in the game. Apparently, it reads the 3rd bit for each song within the archive (or some separate properties file in there?) as a flag for whether to decompress or not: 0 will leave it uncompressed, and 1 will decompress it... somehow.

I have the first MMA file available for examination here. You can also get the full game from my archive here. There are also some video and image files likely stored in the same manner within the disc image, so I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being helpful. Anyway thank you very much for any help. This game's music is pretty good and I've been dying to have it extracted for a long time.

[benamas]

hello i am the friend!!! let me elaborate for anyone else who feels like tackling this...

the MMA files for this game are in a later/more elaborate format than the ones assumed by the BMS scripts:
- first there's that big mystery header, starting with the expected string 'MMFW Sounds'
- then there's the file offsets
- then the file names
after that, the existing scripts expect the file data to start... but in this case, there's a lot more going on before the beginning of the first actual file payload!!

here's a screencap of FURBYSD2.MMA showing off what i've found: https://imgur.com/a/RlTLcs8

- the part highlighted in yellow has 4 bytes per sub-file in the blob, each starting with 0xB3 (same in FURBYSND.MMA). I have no idea what these are and even after i blanked them out completely the game played its music without complaining -- checksums perhaps? if so, the're ignored
- then there's a spacer of 0x00 07
- then there's 1 byte for each file in the archive (highlighted black) -- by fussing around with them and running the game a few times, I determined that these are flags describing the sub-files bitrate and such -- and it seems like bit && 4 determines what format the file is in (i'll get to this in a minute)
- THEN, between that, there's a desert of i don't know what, before the actual file starts at the first actual file offset, 0FFE (not highlighted)

ULTIMATELY, i got the files to sort-of extract with the millionaire3 BMS script, but the AIF files themselves are ALMOST completely junk -- if we force them to play as raw audio, the music and sound effects are vaguely identifiable but garbled. I assume they're compressed somehow, but comtype_scan2 couldn't identify the algorithm either. when i turned off the 4 bits in the black highlighted section, the game tried to play the audio as uncompressed and i got the same staticky mess from the game itself!

any insight on this? does this archive look like anything created by a human being or did some obscure madman develop this file format?

[ThatVideoGameFanatic]

I have the same issue... but my game is Candy Land (1998). I REALLY want the voices from it, but IDK how to get them into perfect quality DX

[koriver]

Hi hi,

Looking to see if anyone has found a solution to this- I am also trying to get the audio from Candy Land 1998....