Hello everyone!For a while now, I've been looking through PS2 and Wii game .ISO's and I've come across some really odd things that I can't find anything about because of it's obscurity. Firstly, I'll tell you what game I'm exploring (I have no idea why I liked this game as a kid, but it's music is astonishing); it's the Coraline Movie Game. I looked through both .ISO's and I've found that all of the data is encrypted in files with the extension corresponding with the respective system. For example, the Wii .ISO has the files encrypted in .WII files, and the PS2 .ISO has it encrypted in .PS2 files. I tried searching this, but every search engine I use filters out the "." in the keyword, and adding the word "extension" into the search proves futile. My main goal is to rip the music straight from the game's data since the quality of it can't get any better than from the source. I thought it was just impossible to decrypt, but then two things happened that gave me a realization:1. I imported the .PS2 and .WII into Audacity by raw audio importing, and I found the creepiest thing: the encrypted audio is layered with static from hell, and it's so sped up. Here's an example:This is the normal title theme for the game:Now, here is the title theme from the PS2 .ISO filesystem (The Wii one sounds exactly the same, and changing the encoding, channels, etc. only worsens the audio quality. Sample rate does the same because of the static.). Volume warning, by the way.https://soundcloud.com/parker-lippstock/titleSettings for raw importing:
Encoding: Signed 8-Bit PCM
Byte order: Little-endian
Channels: 1 Channel (Mono)
Start Offset: 0
Amount to import: 100
Sample rate: 44100For those who haven't lost their ears from listening to it, the song has a faint but noticeable melody, but really sped up. After cleaning it up a little, I was able to get the tempo at just the right setting by putting it 40% speed. I removed as much noise as I could, but it's still bad. Here it is:https://soundcloud.com/parker-lippstock/title2Now the melody is much more noticeable, but the instruments are decimated. My theory as to why this is is because the song is in a format similar to MIDI, and there is also a SoundFont-like file in the game somewhere or even encrypted into that file itself. While it DOES exist, it fails to load it correctly somehow and sets the instrument to a culmination of bytes that the instruments once took up, and because it's encrypted, we get garbage sound. It's quite creepy, but very intriguing.2. On the website "The Cutting Room Floor," a wiki-based site dedicated to data mining in game and console data files, I came across an interesting discovery. A game that I cannot remember the name of, but WAS on PS2, had these same encrypted files, but the data within them was extracted flawlessly, leading me to believe that this IS possible. I don't know if these file's encryption types are exclusive to certain games (like .PAK files in other games) or if they are all universally encrypted with the same algorithm, but it is uneasy to tell.During the making of this post, I attempted to upload the .PS2 file containing the title track, but Mediafire said it was a folder. This was really surprising, and it leads me to believe that this is a folder converted to a file by a means similar to Check Disk recoveries where folders are converted to files for storage. Very strange.If anyone can help me, thank you in advance and please do comment; it will really help! Thank you for reading my wall of text, and have a nice day.-Parkman202
Parkman202OP
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