Guide to selfbooting 45000 LBA DATA/DATA images

[--=FamilyGuy=--]

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

well, depends...i have ripped disc one (everything included) to 95mins and disc 4 (digest movie mono-ized and french and spanish language files kicked out) to 97,5mins. still, i could have optimized disc 4 to keep all language files and still keep it at 97,5mins. why 97,5mins? because thats the max my dc can read. may be other models can read more. would be cool, because i also mastered a sb-rip of spacechannel 5 which was 99:59 big. if a dc could read that far, that would provide me with 22MB more space. thats a huge amount for so highly stacked games like shenmue.

anyways, i still have to rip disc 2 and 3 of shenmue 2. disc 2 is 968MB in size, but i managed to downsize it to 870MB and still keeping all files. this would already be enough to burn that sucker without bootcode to a 99min disc, but that would only be useful for storing reasons. so for disc 2 and 3 the multiple language files would have to go. you can't downsample the sound though. as i already mentioned, shenmue doesn't use soundfiles, but only samples...tens of thousands of them and all are like 5-20kb each. to save a remarkable amount of data, you'd have to downsample thousands of samples, and even then i'd doubt that this would save enough to bring this baby down to 80min. i could also imagine that the sound player shenmue uses is so specialized, that downsampling the sound banks might break their playability for the player, but thats just a theory. compressing the menus wouldn't save you much space. the menu's size plus subtitles and discchanging screens is only 4,5MB. so there's not much to save there. i tried it though. the menu stuff is compressed with gzip, but they already used the best compression. you could try to replace the gzip files with 7z files and the gz-decoding algorithm with a 7z-decoding algorithm. that might downsize the menus a bit further, but that would also be kinda useless, because gzip is really only used for the menus

As far as I can tell, shenmue II speech files are in *.ahx, the ahx code is already know ( to play it, not encode) and it looks like *.adx there's softwares I don't get floating around that can create them. They are pretty much some high;y compressed adx files, wich can,t sound as good as adx for music, but wich are perfect for short speech, since there isn't a billion of notes in 2 or 3 sentences.

Maybe to resize/recompress some textures might aswell help.
My motherlanguage is french, so I wouldn't want to rip the french par of it :P

[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by --=FamilyGuy=--

As far as I can tell, shenmue II speech files are in *.ahx, the ahx code is already know ( to play it, not encode) and it looks like *.adx there's softwares I don't get floating around that can create them. They are pretty much some high;y compressed adx files, wich can,t sound as good as adx for music, but wich are perfect for short speech, since there isn't a billion of notes in 2 or 3 sentences.

you didn't get my point. of course you can extract the adx from the ahx files. but the adx only contain samples of music and speech! yes even the speech is broken down into short samples as it seems. the file that contains the music is only 5MB in size. the rest is all speech and sfx. go ahead and extract free01.afs and you'll end up with 25,000 small sample files for the npc-speech. be my guest and downsample all of those :P

Originally Posted by --=FamilyGuy=--

Maybe to resize/recompress some textures might aswell help.
My motherlanguage is french, so I wouldn't want to rip the french par of it :P

lol i'm german, but i still prefere playing this game in english

anyway, i don't get while people try to cram this and other games on 80min discs. almost all new writers can go beyond 90 or even 95min. 99 and even 100min discs can be easily ordered online and they are dirt cheap!

[--=FamilyGuy=--]

Just to clarify, I meant AHX, not afs, AHX are highly compressed adx and can be even more compressed now with gamecube tools (sega games on GC use ahx and the quality is better fopr a lower bitrate, and someone I know amde a rip of SA2 using the GC files intead of the DC's one to save space)

Also, I think it would be easy to re-encode them all, simply extract hem all, then run like : ahxecoder *.ahx \encoded\*.ahx

Note: ahxencoder isn't a program which exist, it was just a exemple of how I actually often encode files in batch.