Modding / hacking progress summary

[death]

gencoreoperative said:

The Tyrian sound effects link is members.lycos.co.uk/stupidityzone/tyrian/

the sound effects dload dosen't work (it does but there is nothing in the zip file)

[sgomes]

death said:

the sound effects dload dosen't work (it does but there is nothing in the zip file)

There is, I downloaded it. You must be doing something wrong.

[death]

did you open It yet?

[Tempest]

I believe you need to unzip it. I have all sound effects, too.

[death]

ok, strange

[Tempest]

I've even applied some sound effects as a windows theme. I have the sound when a shot from the Missile Launcher is fired for when I open a menu, and the sound you hear when firing the Hot Dog Blast is installed on my computer to notify me that a pop-up has been blocked.

[death]

how do you change that stuff?

[Gamera]

At work my boss has sound effects from Tetrinet as her Windows sounds. I have no idea how that happened. To change your sound effects go to the control panel -> Sounds and Audio Devices -> Sounds.

[death]

but How do you CHANGE the actual sounds

[Gamera]

In the Program Events box click on the sound you want to change then click on Browse and select a wav file.

[death]

oh

[felineki]

Awesome topic! I particularly want to thank szevvy and Mindless for the graphics-ripping utilities. I like messing around with video game sprites and these will really come in handy. Thanks a lot!

[AntX]

Hi everyone.

Nice topic! I've always enjoyed tyrian, and it is a great pleasure to see more and more people trying to dissect the guts of the beast and try to do a remake of this original fast-paced awesome shooter that is Tyrian.

However, I see that the sound effects that are linked here will not give the tyrian-hackers community a *perfect* reprensatation of the actual in-game sounds.

Don't get me wrong. To our ears, they WILL sound quite good. But since they where actually ripped using dosbox, we've actually lost some binary information in the process.

I used to just open the TYRIAN.SND file with a windows utility (cant remember which), and I could hear the effects, altough I could not specify which sound I wanted to play, since it was a whole archive, and not multiple files.

I can tell that the sounds are RAW, Unsigned, 8bit, 8000hz (eeek!) and mono.

There seems to be NO space between the actual sounds in TYRIAN.SND

However, there IS a header (probably a kind of index for all the sounds so that tyrian could just point to a sound number)

Knowing that, I dugg a little bit, and found this WONDERFUL utility:

sox.sourceforge.net/

Which is a tool to convert all kind of sounds (command-line only folks).

It works under linux and windows too (tried both with great success).

Now try this: sox -t raw -r8000 -swc1 TYRIAN.SND tyrian.wav

And you will get a serial wave file containing all the files. Now, can someone try to decipher the header for us?

Thanks! And keep up the good work.

Alex

PS: How about a GPL engine for the remake, so everyone could contribute?

[AntX]

AntX said:

I can tell that the sounds are RAW, Unsigned, 8bit, 8000hz (eeek!) and mono.

(..)

Now try this: sox -t raw -r8000 -swc1 TYRIAN.SND tyrian.wav

Dumb me!

After all, I was a bit off-road. The sounds are RAW SIGNED, 8bit, 11Khz, and mono.

So, to get a *perfect* sound, you'd have to try:

sox -t raw -V -r11025 -sbc1 TYRIAN.SND tyrian.wav

And that's about it.

Now something you will notice about sox is that it complains that 8 bits sounds CANNOT be signed, but they can! It says it reverts to unsigned, but its wrong, since if you listen to the sound with the -s option, it sounds okay, but if you specify unsigned, its just awful.

To be continued... same bat-hour, same bat-channel.

[szevvy]

OK, hooked up. www.szevvy.net/downloads/wombat_tyrian.zip. Happily plays and exports tyrian.snd (sounds), voices.snd (in-game speech) and voicesc.snd (christmas sounds, this one sounds a bit echo-y and odd to me though...).

The header has the following format:

unsigned16 numberOfSounds;
unsigned32 soundDataOffset[numberOfSounds]

Enjoy!

edit: Tits, I've forgotten to give everyone credit in the program...gah. I'll fix that up as soon as I finish downloading from the FTP (about 45 mins).