Stuntman Ignition PS2 SFXMUSIC.MBK

Extraction and unpacking of game archives and compression, encryption, obfuscation, decoding of unknown files
Game Ripper
Posts: 123
Joined: Sat Sep 02, 2017 12:56 pm

Stuntman Ignition PS2 SFXMUSIC.MBK

Post by Game Ripper »

Hi everyone, any help is desperately needed with unpacking yet another bigfile. It should contain all BGMs & SFX from the game but there're no typical Sony ADPCM headers to be found (like "VAGp", "SShd" or at least "FSB#" ones).
Track headers might still be located en masse in the very beginning of an archive (maybe starting at 0xf20 and ending at 0x1cd8? There're many "44AC" hex values throughout that segment and it supposedly means frequency values for each stream). Such assumption was originally made while examining X360 ver. of this VG though. I merely tried to somehow apply that theory to PS2 port of the title in question just so that you know. BTW Here's the topic (post by Bxaimc) where I found this info.
I upped quite a slice from file start as well as a bit of bigfile's "tail". These cuts have just a few songs + a bunch of SFX in them but such sounds are definitely not my main focus. Quite a few instrumental pieces of diverse original music were composed for Stuntman: Ignition so that I'd really like to be able to listen to them in their original glory (I mean making a decent complete streamed rip for this title would be my dream if circumstances allow it to happen).
Best regards and thanks in advance to whoever manages to figure out this pesky archive format!
Game Ripper
Posts: 123
Joined: Sat Sep 02, 2017 12:56 pm

Re: Stuntman Ignition PS2 SFXMUSIC.MBK

Post by Game Ripper »

Hello guys, I've just figured out that inspection of a similar archive might be useful and would generally lead to better understanding of bigfile posted above. Here you can find cuts from VOICE.MBK (start & ending as usual, size of original file is ~ 204 MB), another audio bank probably having the same structure as aforementioned SFXMUSIC.MBK. I guess if one compares similar sections of one file to corresponding parts of another one he can actually understand this sound bank format. I mean when a VGM ripper has at least 2 samples to work with he's no longer looking at some random hex values, right?
Best wishes!
PS. Another idea came to my mind recently: maybe devs of this VG had the same reasoning behind archiving their data as authors of Rage by id Software? That means all audio banks don't contain any stream names in them but those names can be found in main bigfile, the one containing all other data (images, models, scripts, etc.) plus filenames for BGM, SFX, VO (streams found in a completely different archive)? Taking all this into account I can also post samples of SM2PS2.VFS, a 600+ MB whopper supposedly storing all files used by the game expect videos and sounds.
Bye all!
aluigi
Site Admin
Posts: 12984
Joined: Wed Jul 30, 2014 9:32 pm

Re: Stuntman Ignition PS2 SFXMUSIC.MBK

Post by aluigi »

Lot of text and links hidden inside the text... headache!
Really, usually users get bored quickly :)

It's a chaotic format that just wastes time, too long to explain.
I made a work-in-progress script (there will be no additional work on it anyway) that probably can work:
http://aluigi.org/bms/stuntman_ignition_mbk.bms
Game Ripper
Posts: 123
Joined: Sat Sep 02, 2017 12:56 pm

Stungtman - Ignition (X360)

Post by Game Ripper »

Hi Luigi, I hope it's not too much to ask you to look into samples of this format but from another platform (I hope audio quality is the highest on Xbox)... Maybe it's not such a chaotic waste of time as its PS2 (and possibly PS3) counterparts.
Anyway I've got some cuts and full files here, thanks in advance to whoever tries to understand or reverse them!
Goodbye!