The composer of Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo is playing the game again!!!

Hey everyone, George Sanger and I are playing Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo with it’s HiFi music today! Here’s the link to our YouTube stream: https://youtu.be/IBu__8W-PAk

If you have any questions for George, now is the time! Can’t wait to see you there!!!

Was going to check this out, but it appears the stream has since been made private. Shame.

For those unaware, Tim updated the soundtrack releases of George Sanger's SCUMM games with files that can be played in the games themselves using ScummVM. This was apparently WindowsTV's work, but the initial releases had a lot of issues. In addition to Putt-Putt 2's soundtrack not working at all for unknown reasons, the other soundtracks have lots of misordered tracks and a few missing ones (due to them not covering tracks that are treated as sound effects). I've been working on fixing them, but it's currently on hold while I wait on some feedback from Tim. Freddi Fish 1's soundtrack should work perfectly fine once my fixes are applied, but the others will take a lot more work. And I don't know if fixing Putt-Putt 2 is even possible. ScummVM doesn't seem to even support overriding its music tracks.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:Was going to check this out, but it appears the stream has since been made private. Shame.

New link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK29Nq6Balo&t=6s

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:Freddi Fish 1's soundtrack should work perfectly fine once my fixes are applied, but the others will take a lot more work.

That's actually super useful because George and I are to plan another live stream but I hadn't been able to fix up FF1's soundtrack myself. Do you have yours ready?

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:I don't know if fixing Putt-Putt 2 is even possible. ScummVM doesn't seem to even support overriding its music tracks.

It is, I already identified the issue and just need time to fix it. I want to add proper support for Talkies in with this fix as well.

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out eventually. You might wanna remove the timestamp from it, BTW (the "&t=6s" part).

I have a batch file that automatically renames the required files from the soundtrack accordingly and retrieves a few tracks I edited. I was hoping that relying on batch files could reduce the file size by removing the need to include lots of duplicate tracks. It also allows for easy compatibility with multiple versions of the game and soundtrack. I sent it to Tim quite a while ago, but he seems to have been too busy to review it. I'll send him a reminder.

Great to hear you figured out what's wrong with Putt-Putt 2. Would you mind explaining? I could work on fixing that game's soundtrack as well if I knew how to make it work. It'd probably be one of the easier soundtracks to fix, given its short length.

Also, I'm surprised you managed to find a way to make voice clips work. That's the one thing I couldn't figure out. I can see the IDs of audio files the games play by running them at debug level 5 or higher, but voice clips always seem to temporarily get the ID 1. I don't know if there's much of a point in replacing them, though. We only have high quality versions of about half of Putt-Putt 3's clips, and retiming and inserting all of those would be a nightmare.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:I have a batch file that automatically renames the required files from the soundtrack accordingly and retrieves a few tracks I edited. I was hoping that relying on batch files could reduce the file size by removing the need to include lots of duplicate tracks.

I agree a batch file would be better. Is that batch file ready? I need it for George and I's let's play. If it is when George and I talk again I'll give him the file for upload, it is his Bandcamp after all.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:Great to hear you figured out what's wrong with Putt-Putt 2. Would you mind explaining? I could work on fixing that game's soundtrack as well if I knew how to make it work.

ScummVM's code needs to use the stream instead of using the internal music system. A small structure change will allow it to work. My code additions are on the Github.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:Also, I'm surprised you managed to find a way to make voice clips work. That's the one thing I couldn't figure out.

Yeah, it's a way haha. Just need to implement it to see if it works and not just a theory.

I'll send you the batch file and edits in a moment. Since the latter are copyrighted material, I'll do it via PM. I actually have a number of different versions of the file, but I presume George Sanger will be playing the version of the game available on Steam on Windows using the FLAC version of his soundtrack, right? If not, let me know. I also have versions for the 2007 version of the game (I picked that one because it has some minor enhancements over the other versions), the other audio formats ScummVM supports, and equivalent files in the SH format, which runs on Linux and should work on MacOS as well, though I can't confirm the latter.

As for the fix to allow ScummVM to override Putt-Putt 2's tracks, are you talking about ScummVM's official repository? Can't find any commits or pull requests there that seem to reference that. If it's just a fork of your own, I'd advise submitting the changes as a pull request once they're polished enough. It would be inconvenient if users had to download a separate ScummVM build for the game. Also, does the fix work with the DOS version as well? Would be nice if it did, seeing how it's superior to the Windows versions in a few ways.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:but I presume George Sanger will be playing the version of the game available on Steam on Windows using the FLAC version of his soundtrack, right?

We played Zoo with the MP3s from the download but FLAC is fine since ScummVM can support it. I originally wanted to play the original release of Freddi since I don't have the newer release with added skip capabilities. But if I can get my hands on it, I'd rather play that one.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:As for the fix to allow ScummVM to override Putt-Putt 2's tracks, are you talking about ScummVM's official repository? [...] Also, does the fix work with the DOS version as well? Would be nice if it did, seeing how it's superior to the Windows versions in a few ways.

It's already in the Daily Build of ScummVM (as noted in my How-to video) to learn more about the changes please visit the pull here: https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/2569

Technically speaking the DOS versions can work as well, as already mentioned the stream override for the external files just need to be restructured to happen over the imuse sound device in ScummVM. The classic HE games and their audio seemed to have been sent through this unlike the newer HE games.

The 2007 version also has colored item cursors and plays music during the shooting minigame. It has some new bugs as well, but most of them seem to be exclusive to the SPUTM interpreter. One minor annoyance is that ScummVM hangs on the Humongous logo at the very beginning, so you always have to press Escape to get past that. It was a target-exclusive release, so it's rather obscure, but copies still pop up online on eBay occasionally.

If you end up getting your hands on it and want to use it instead, let me know, and I'll give you the appropriate BAT file. The sound effect IDs are slightly different there. Also note that if your version doesn't match up with what's on Steam, I can't guarantee the sound effect IDs will be right. If that's the case, you may want to test it by opening the save or load menu. If the music there isn't enhanced, they're wrong.

BTW, just in case it wasn't clear, this stuff isn't supposed to be included in the official soundtrack before Tim approves of it. I don't want to bypass him or anything like that. I just gave it to you ahead of time for the promotion.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:Also note that if your version doesn't match up with what's on Steam

Is the steam version the 1994 release, 2007, or something else? The version of Zoo's music was curated by Tim and I for the 1995 version of Zoo, which I was told was the version on Steam. I refuse to buy the steam games due to complicated feelings and findings regarding the game data.

I believe the Steam version uses the data from the game's first release, but I can't say for sure, given how many this particular game has. It has the crooked arrow cursors and everything. Its HE0 file has a size of 26.078 Bytes. Does that match up with yours?

Yep, that's the size of my HE0. Should probably check the size of the HE1 and HE4 as the HE0 just contains indexing info vs assets.

HE4: 25,753,678 bytes
HE1: 54,672,462 bytes

Huh, that's weird. The HE1 file size matches, but the HE4 one doesn't. Mine is 25.623.197 Bytes. Don't know what the deal is with that, but whatever differences there are in the HE4 file are unlikely to matter, since most of the tracks in there will be overridden anyway. If the HE1 files are the same, then the game should use the same track IDs.

In the first place, a mismatch of the HE4 track IDs is very unlikely to begin with. Those are identical in both the Steam and 2007 versions, despite their long age gap. What's more likely is a mismatch of the sound effect track IDs. Just to make sure everything's fine, could you test if the theme in the save and load menu and the fiddle tracks get properly replaced with the batch file I sent you?

Good news. After a long hiatus, I finally resumed work on this project. I'm already done with Putt-Putt 2 and Freddi Fish 1. Both of their soundtracks were updated a few days ago with a bunch of scripts that will set things up so that the soundtracks can be played with ScummVM. I had to edit a couple of tracks to match up more closely with their in-game versions, but it wasn't particularly hard.

I'm currently working on Pajama Sam 3, which has already proven itself to be far more work. Humongous' sound engineers made some drastic changes to certain tracks that I have to recreate to the best of my ability. Some of my edits ended up very close, but others forced me to make some compromises. It'll hopefully be ready for release soon.

And now Pajama Sam 3's soundtrack can also be inserted. I just playtested it yesterday and the higher music quality really adds to the experience.

This soundtrack was brutally difficult to work with. Humongous messed with some of the tracks in crazy ways. It was often very challenging to even figure out what they did, let alone recreate their edits. I honestly don't even think they did a particularly good job with some of them, but I still had to try my best to recreate them, since various cutscenes are timed with these edits in mind. It's a shame Humongous didn't work more closely with George Sanger on this because as good as the game still sounds, I'm sure he and Team Fat could have done a better job at altering some of their tracks to suit their needs.

The first track that plays in the game is easily my least satisfactory recreation. It's based on the track Den Mother, but with all sorts of strange changes. Humongous must have had access to some pre-production material for this track because it clearly isn't possible to recreate some of their edits with just its final version. I had to use what I had access to, which resulted in one part of the track sounding awkward and repetitive, but this was the best I could come up with after hours of experimentation.

I managed to recreate the rest of the edits much more faithfully. It was a ton of work to get them this close, but I'm proud of the results. I even managed to recreate the factory theme (a version of I R Sam with some factory noise in the background that was added by Humongous) by using spectral editing to partially isolate the factory noise, then mixing it with I R Sam's soundtrack version.

Sadly, this release doesn't cover one of the tracks that plays in the food pyramid area. It's not included in the soundtrack because its source material was lost. There's another lost track, but that one only lies around unused in the game's data.

On a side note, even though Games to Play on Any Day mostly uses music from this soundtrack, it's unfortunately currently impossible to insert the remastered tracks into that game. ScummVM doesn't support audio modding for such a recent version of the SCUMM engine. Hopefully that'll change in the future.