[MPlayer-dev-eng] Saturn version of Castlevania Symphony of the Night

[Rob Diehl]

I fired off an email to Mike Melanson earlier and decided I would just
subscribe to the list in case any discussion comes up.

First off, I realize it's not necessarily the priority of a PC based
audio/video player to support every single console audio codec under the
sun. Having that been said...

My question is regarding the soundtrack to the SEGA Saturn version of
Castlevania. I have a friend who is heavily into sequencing and remixing
console video game music. I'm attempting to get the audio tracks from the
Saturn version converted into something listenable for him on a PC. The
problem is the music tracks are in some strange (I think?) IMA ADPCM
variant. I've tried using just about every decoder under the sun to get it
decoded to RAW or at least standard WAV PCM but nothing seems to work. I
found some IMA ADPCM routines and wrote a small decoder in C but get the
same distorted output as other utilities (ie- PCMCONV.EXE, a small utility
in Japanese for converting PCM/ADPCM). It sounds much better than just
playing the ADPCM as straight PCM, but it's still not right.

Does anyone have any insight on this audio format? I've uploaded a sample
track along with PCMCONV.EXE to ftp.mplayerhq.nu /MPlayer/incoming/Saturn/

The command line parameters for PCMCONV I used to get the decoded, yet
distorted output were:
-ir44100 -or44100 -if 9 -of 0

Thanks

-Rob