SLUS-01272 007 - The World is not Enough

[Meerkov]

Hi, I see there is a list of games that have been tested. I went ahead and tested [ ] SLUS-01272 007 - The World is not Enough

It seems to work pretty well as the movies extract successfully, and even audio dialog.

But, there are no files for the music. That's a bit surprising because the movies and dialog have no trouble extracting, and it seems unlikely the music would be in a different file format, but I guess it must be the case.

Should this be marked as [!] - Something Doesn't Work?

Should there be a way to track what doesn't work?

[m35]

Thanks for testing jPSXdec. "Works" isn't very clear. For me, a game works when it meets these requirements:

• All FMVs on the disc that utilize the MDEC chip are identified and are fully, correctly, and accurately decoded. By accurately, I mean, it ideally matches the original media that the developers used to create the video. But if that's not feasible, that it accurately matches what is shown when played on the game. The start and end of videos are correct, so videos are split properly if possible.
• All standard formatted Tim images are identified and extracted correctly. Specifically, the image can be extracted with all the palette variations used in the game, if possible.
• All XA audio is identified and correctly split into into the clips that are used in the game.
• Any SPU audio that is used by videos is identified and played with the associated video.

One of the more obvious things that is outside the scope of jPSXdec is non-XA audio. This can include short audio clips and sound effects, as well as sequenced music. Sequenced music is like MIDI music, while XA is like .wav. It can be difficult for users to identify the difference between XA audio and those other audio types, especially when XA audio can sometimes be used for audio clips as well.

There's really no way users can know 100% if a games is actually meeting all those requirements. But the most helpful would be when you know a game well enough that you are confident you've seen all the FMVs, then check if jPSXdec can find all of them and they are extracted correctly. Otherwise, the best people can do to help is to test games and see if anything is obviously wrong, even if you don't know the game very well. This could be any errors being reported, or audio or video not being split up correctly, or corrupted.

[Meerkov]

Thanks, that's very helpful to understand how I can provide the best feedback. Maybe this summary should be at the top of the Tested Games list so other people can see it.

I'll especially keep my eyes open for anything that looks corrupted.

One other note: I also tried [ ] SLUS-00508 Beast Wars - Transformers. There, the music seems to export correctly, but the files have about ~40 seconds of silence at the end. I won't file a bug because it doesn't seem corrupted.

[m35]

the files have about ~40 seconds of silence at the end

No actually that is helpful to know. It may be that the audio is not being split up correctly. So is worth looking into to verify if that really is how the audio is, or if it's supposed to be split up somehow, and if there's a way to do that automatically. Thanks for testing that.

[Meerkov]

I looked more into 007 The World Is Not Enough.

Using PSound (mentioned on one of the open bugs) I was able to find that inside of each folder LVL01CD.bin through LVL11CD.bin I was able to locate many sound effects. Usually one of the last handful in each folder was the sound track for that level. PSound plays everything at 2x speed, which I think is a common parsing mistake, but they are undeniably there.

For example, there is a file L01/L01CD.bin/LVL01CD_00076.wav

I'm not fully familiar if PSound supports other sound formats. But I was able to extract the file successfully.

[m35]

These short clips are something PSound can detect but jPSXdec can't, since they're not XA. Their format may best be known as the "VAG" format (an audio file type used in the PS1 SDK), but could also be called PlayStation ADPCM, or maybe Bit Rate Reduction format. I just call it SPU audio because it's in the format that the PS1 Sound Processor Unit (SPU) understands. Maybe someday support can be added for it in jPSXdec, but it's currently not on my roadmap.