Various updates to Curator's Bandcamp soundtracks

Enough has happened recently that I'd argue it deserves a new topic, even if it will probably still get overlooked, seeing how this forum is now deader than ever.

Recently, the soundtracks for Putt-Putt Goes To The Moon, Freddi Fish And The Case Of The Missing Kelp Seeds, Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo and Pajama Sam 3 were updated with the ability to play them in their actual games using ScummVM. The groundwork for this was already created some time ago by WindowsTV as well as a friend of him who added audio modding support for most HE games to ScummVM. However, the initial implementations were flawed in a lot of ways.

Over the last two months, I worked with Tim (the guy behind Curator) to improve on them. This was a very challenging process that involved determining the correct track IDs through hex-editing and reading debug logs, and editing many existing tracks to match up more closely with what's used in the games. Now all four of these soundtracks have batch files (or Bourne Shell scripts for macOS and Linux users) that will assemble all of the required tracks.

There are some limitations however. Putt-Putt Goes To The Moon's soundtrack can't be inserted into versions of the game that use MIDI due to a lack of ScummVM support. It's unclear if this can even be added. Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo lacks the handful of tracks by Rhett Mathis. And more importantly, with one exception, none of the tracks have any of the animal sounds that many of the original tracks were full of. There may be a solution to this in the future, but I can make no guarantees. Pajama Sam 3 lacks one of the tracks that can play in and near the food pyramid. It's been lost to time. Additionally, some of my recreations of the edits Humongous made to its soundtrack are less faithful than the rest. The first track that plays in the game is by far the least satisfactory one. Humongous messed with this track in some crazy ways that clearly aren't possible to recreate without more source material than what's in the soundtrack. Finally, while much of the music in Pajama Sam: Games To Play On Any Day was taken from Pajama Sam 3, it's currently not possible to insert it into that game. Hopefully, ScummVM will add audio modding support for it in the future.

Also worth noting that Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo's soundtrack was updated with three new variations of the Water Height track. Tim noticed he'd accidentally omitted them when I discovered that the only version that was previously available doesn't match up with what's in the game.


Additionally, SPY Fox 2's soundtrack has finally gotten a proper release as well: https://jamdee.bandcamp.com/album/spy-fox-2-some-assembly-required-collectors-edition-remastered-soundtrack
No ScummVM support yet, but I plan to work on it in the future.

I didn't mention this here, but Spy Fox 2's soundtrack already got ScummVM support a while ago.

And Pablo's original theme by Rhett Mathis received its own release: https://jamdee.bandcamp.com/track/pablo-sanchez-remastered

No plans to work on ScummVM support for it. I don't think it's really worth it. Would probably sound weird when only a single track is remastered.

Furthermore, George Sanger's contributions to the Junior Field Trips are now also on Bandcamp: https://thefatmanandteamfat.bandcamp.com/album/lets-explore-the-airport-remastered-soundtrack

They just got updated again with ScummVM support. Since this release doesn't include the tracks by Richard Moe and Rhett Mathis, it can only replace the title theme in Let's Explore the Farm and Let's Explore the Jungle, but it also covers the music in Let's Explore the Airport's lobby.

Finally, though this will still take a while, I've been hard at work on the animal sounds in Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo. It's the hardest thing I ever did for Tim, but it'll be awesome if I can get it done.

Bit of good news. As some may be aware of, the obscure spin-off Pajama Sam: Games to Play on Any Day mostly uses music from Pajama Sam 3. Because that game uses a different audio system than most HE games, ScummVM used to lack audio modding support for it.

But recently, a very dedicated developer completely reworked both of ScummVM's implementations of HE's audio systems with higher accuracy (that dreadful bug where ScummVM can't play multiple instances of the same sound effect is finally fixed). And while they were at it, they implemented my request and made the more recent audio system moddable as well. As such, I whipped up a ScummVM pack for the game which was just added to Pajama Sam 3's soundtrack.

Worth noting that it's missing a total of three tracks. Two of them were newly composed for the game by Scott Lloyd Shelly and Kelly Kristek rather than members of Team Fat. The other is a track assumed by Tim to have been composed by Joe McDermott, who was part of Team Fat. But the source for this particular track has been lost to history. Although neither of the two games actually uses it. It just lies around in their HE4 files.

I had wondered, since Games to Play uses Miles, which is somewhat flexible, if it'd be possible to mod better quality audio or even different formats right into the game files. I'm not sure if anyone figured out how though.

Onfy wrote:I had wondered, since Games to Play uses Miles, which is somewhat flexible, if it'd be possible to mod better quality audio or even different formats right into the game files. I'm not sure if anyone figured out how though.

Interesting idea. I believe the HE4 format is quite simple, so someone with enough hex-editing experience could probably try inserting higher quality WAV files in there and see if the game can handle them. Unlike HE's own sound engine, this sound engine expects WAV files to have headers, so it should receive information on things like their frequency. And I don't think the HE4 format works with offsets, so changing those should be inconsequential.

Don't try this with the other files, though. The voice clips in the HE2 files aren't accessed through IDs at all, but entirely through their offsets. You'd have to extensively rescript the game to change those. Some stuff in the (A) files is also dependent on offsets.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:

Onfy wrote:I had wondered, since Games to Play uses Miles, which is somewhat flexible, if it'd be possible to mod better quality audio or even different formats right into the game files. I'm not sure if anyone figured out how though.

Interesting idea. I believe the HE4 format is quite simple, so someone with enough hex-editing experience could probably try inserting higher quality WAV files in there and see if the game can handle them. Unlike HE's own sound engine, this sound engine expects WAV files to have headers, so it should receive information on things like their frequency. And I don't think the HE4 format works with offsets, so changing those should be inconsequential.

Don't try this with the other files, though. The voice clips in the HE2 files aren't accessed through IDs at all, but entirely through their offsets. You'd have to extensively rescript the game to change those. Some stuff in the (A) files is also dependent on offsets.

I tried quickly testing your theory, brutalizing one game's HE4 by deleting one byte from its first song. The result was that Scummvm refused to play the music.

Having experience hex editing, and from a very cursory examination of the beginning of the file, I see the string SGEN repeating followed each time by 2 sets of bytes, one or both is probably an offset. I'm not super familiar with the SCUMM engine, but my guess is the difference here is that the offsets are self-contained in the HE4 (evidently, since swapping between games works), but HE2 offsets might be in the game's main binary. (With the scripts?)

Update: Preliminary documentation. Actually, there are 3 sets of bytes. The bytes from the file I'm looking at:

15 40 1f (song ID?)
The middle byte seems to increment. The next header is 15 41 1f.

b3 04 (offset?)

28 d4 0c (unknown)

These last values always seem different.

Considering that this is hardly the first time somebody has reverse engineered SCUMM, maybe best to gleam from their work...?

Update 2: https://sleeping.town/@onfy/111231258528478969

I suppose that's possible. I remember that someone had success swapping the HE4 files of different games, so if offsets are used anywhere, it should be within the HE4 files themselves.

From my experience working with ScummVM's audio override system, HE4 tracks seem to be referred to by IDs. If you run a recent build of ScummVM with a high enough debug level, you'll get a table at launch telling you all of the track IDs used and what location they correspond to. Also worth noting that these IDs don't have to match the actual order of the tracks inside the HE4 file. They usually do, but not in Freddi Fish 1 or Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo.

Sound effects from the HE1 or (A) file are also referred to by ID, but said IDs always seem to match their order. That's to say, sound effect 500 always seems to be the 500th sound effect in the HE1 or (A) file.

In contrast, voice clips have no IDs and are instead referred to with their offsets in the HE2 file. That's why modding them in a way the original SPUTM interpreter supports is extremely difficult if you don't preserve their offsets. I did it once to fix the faulty voice clips in Pajama Sam 1's 1999 version, but that was only possible because the clips I inserted were all smaller, so I just had to pad out the rest with null bytes. Inserting a larger voice clip would've been much harder. I imagine the easiest way would've been to put it at the very end of the file, then edit the script that plays it to use the updated offset, while making sure it retains the exact same size as before. Modding voice clips for ScummVM is very easy, though. I did it for a single line in the Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo ScummVM pack. Just have ScummVM play the original with a high enough debug level to see what filename the audio override system wants, then create a "speech" directory and put the clip there with precisely that name.

Also, Sam actually says "eine Party" at the end of that video. "Einer Party" would be grammatically incorrect in that context.

This has been in the works for over a year, but Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo just got a new soundtrack release that I'm very proud of: https://thefatmanandteamfat.bandcamp.com/album/putt-putt-saves-the-zoo-remastered-soundtrack-wild-edition

Before inserting them into the game, HE's audio engineers added various animal sound effects to 24 of the tracks they'd received from Team Fat in order to give them more of a zoo atmosphere. For unknown reasons, George Sanger's only copy of Delta Guitar has those sound effects baked into it, but his copies of the other 23 tracks have none of them. Because of this, they're also absent from the versions found in the remastered soundtrack.

But I found out that all of these sounds were taken from a total of five different royalty-free sound effect libraries. (If anyone's interested, the tracks can be divided into three categories with completely different sounds: Cartown, Jungle Land and Grassland. Sound effects from Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Trax Volume 1 appear in all three of them, but the Jungle Land sounds are almost entirely from the former, while the Grassland tracks feature more from the latter. Three of the Cartown sounds are from The General Series 6000, while another is from Warner Bros. And the cricket sound that appears all over most of the Grassland tracks is a heavily (and quite perplexingly) modified version of a sound from The Premiere Edition Volume 1.)

So for the sake of restoring the lost zoo atmosphere, I invested months of hard work into restoring these sounds with Audacity. It was much harder than any of the past edits I made for the ScummVM packs, but the results are great. And now they're finally available for the public to hear.

Unfortunately, I was just forced to discover that the ScummVM pack is broken. Attempting to prepare it ahead of time was a mistake. I mispredicted the filenames, so I'll have to fix that. Shouldn't take long.

Edit: It's fixed now.