Okay, for purposes decidedly unrelated to ROM hacking, I've been collecting extracted sound files from many, many computer and console games. I've figured out most of the easy ones - the Quake games, Half-Life 2, among others. I've also got a fairly good handle on taking the sound data from most SNES and PS1 games. But what really has me confused is the Nintendo 64.

There are two games that stand out, namely Perfect Dark and The World is Not Enough. My goal is to be able to extract most of the gunfire and sound effects from both games, as well as most of the battle chatter if I can get my hands on it. Now, I noticed that today's RHDN update included a program capable of doing some manipulation on Rare's N64 games, Perfect Dark included.

I opened said program, set it to Perfect Dark mode via the drop box, and then used the Uncompress ROM button on my copy of the game (in z64 format). Rather than doing anything useful, the program began to flood my two gigabytes of system RAM. I imagine that this is a memory leak of some sort, but whatever the case it doesn't seem to be of any use whatsoever in spite of this. The included readme file was decidedly unhelpful.

Something's occurred to me though - is this even the program I would use to extract/decompress the sound effects from Perfect Dark?

Its been 9 days I'm sure you're safe to bump it at least once.  And you could try and see if there is a program that searches files for ACM or ADPCM encoded waves.  Otherwise Perfect Dark may be compressed into a format that you/we aren't familar with.

Hmm. Well, I'm experimenting with some programs I have lying around - Dragon UnPACKer's Hyperripper utility ought to let me search through the rom for anything that looks like a WAV, VOC, or MPEG-compressed file. I recall PD's copyright screen saying something about using MPEG Layer-3 technology (from memory - not positive that's actually what it said).

...aaand...no luck. DUP failed to find anything. Not surprising, though, honestly - the program's actually intended for PC games and not Nintendo 64 ROMs, so that's out of the question I guess...

Poring through the ROM with a copy of Hexplorer showed me a few things which I assume are textures, but it's not the textures I'm after. Then I realized, I can't read hex code. Argh =P

Well, that's unfortunate...from what I understand, the R4300 is a pretty complicated CPU in the first place, so the assembly for it would probably be pretty painful to pore over. Add to that, I'm not really a hacker (had a few bouts with Tile Layer, but never could figure the thing out)...guess Perfect Dark is gonna have to go untouched by me, then.