raffclar

raffclar

python dev

Black & White audio explained

1 minute read

Summary

Sound in black & white 1 is bit of mess. The game’s music and dialogue was considered too large for hard-drives back then so they decided to use various techniques to reduce the amount of MBs taken up. These techniques worked and they were able to ship the game.

Music

  • Compressed as MP2
  • Stored on the game CD
  • Split up into “sectors”. This is for performance reasons. Reading an entire song from the CD and decoding it would have taken a couple of seconds
  • Always stereo
  • Sailor’s song on Land 1 is treated as music

Dialogue

  • More than 90% of the dialogue is compressed as MP2 however there are a few that are raw
  • Stored in the game directory
  • Always mono for 3D and to save space

FX

  • More than 90% is uncompressed. A couple of FX sounds are compressed, namely the logo sound (which is also stereo) and the volcano ambience on the last campaign island.
  • Compression is either MP2 or MS-ADPCM (Microsoft’s Adaptive Delta Pulse Code Modulation)
  • For MS-ADPCM it’s worth looking into doing this ourselves as it’s not too hard to decode ADPCM into PCM.
  • 3D sounds have to be in mono which is why more than 99% of FX are in mono. Exclusions include looped ambience which are stereo (and heard from all directions)

Sound variants found so far

sound type sound format container layout channels sample rate bit rate possible ffmpeg alternative license
Music MPEG-1 Audio Layer II mpg stereo 2     mpg123 LGPLv2.1
Dialogue MPEG-1 Audio Layer II wav mono 1 22050 64 mpg123 LGPLv2.1
Dialogue PCM 16-bit wav mono 1 22050 43Ko/s dr_wav Public domain
FX PCM 16-bit wav mono 1 22050 43Ko/s dr_wav Public domain
FX MPEG-1 Audio Layer II wav mono/stereo 1/2 22050 64 mpg123 LGPLv2.1
FX looped atmos PCM 16-bit wav stereo 2 22050 86Ko/s dr_wav Public domain
FX ADPCM 4-bit wav mono 1 22050 86Ko/s None that I could find  

Sounds pulled from the game

  1. dialog_pcm_mono
  2. dialog_mp2_mono
  3. fx_pcm_mono
  4. fx_pcm_stereo
  5. fx_mp2_mono
  6. fx_mp2_stereo
  7. fx_adpcm_mono

Further reading:

  1. MS-ADPCM explained
  2. dr_wav library
  3. mpg123 library
  4. vcpkg supports mpg123

Updated:

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