I'm having trouble creating a PSF for this game. Since it's not listed on joshw or Zophar, I suspect it's technically difficult to extract.
Looking through the game files, I found clearly labeled files: BGMALL.SEZ, RPG.VB, and RPG.VH. Using VGMToolbox, I was able to extract 33 SEQ files, which matches the number of BGM tracks in the game, along with the VB and VH files. I attempted to create PSFs from these, but most of them produce no sound — occasionally just a single note.
I created a sound driver using PSF Stub Creator from the SLPS_008.76 executable, but the result was the same.
I tried extracting BGMALL.SEZ with ficelzs, but it didn’t help.
I analyzed the files with pgconv, but only three MIDI files were detected. When I tried playing them, they produced no sound.
Using PSound, I analyzed RPG.VB and was only able to extract sound effects and what seemed to be tone samples.
In VGMTrans, BGMALL.SEZ displays 33 SEQ files. While they do have a pQES header, the commands that follow seem disorganized or inconsistent, making them look different from SEQ files used in other games.
Interestingly, SNG37.SEQ and SNG38.SEQ located in the same folder were able to be PSF-converted without issue.
While an SSF (Sega Saturn Sound Format) set exists for the Saturn version, I really want to create a PSF set for the PlayStation version as well. I never expected that extracting music from such a niche game would be this difficult.
If anyone with the technical know-how has any information, I would greatly appreciate your help. Thank you very much.
You may very much be right in thinking the files are compressed, as it does seem that way. However, I do not know which algorithm it uses (nor have I done much PSX stuff so I can't really guess).
The SEZ file contains (seemingly) compressed SEQs, with a custom header on top of each SEQ, perhaps used by the decompressor. It's a trivial format to write an extractor for, decompressing it not so much.
VGMToolbox strips the SEZ headers from the SEQs though so if a decompressor is found, it likely wouldn't operate on the files anyway as they would be truncated.
Thank you very much for the information and advice! And it's amazing that you were actually able to extract the correct SEQ files!
I don't have any experience with debugging or much knowledge in that area, so going further from here is extremely difficult for me (though I'll try my best to experiment...!!)
Addendum Thanks to your advice, I was able to successfully create PSF files.
Although I wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact address where the SEZ data is decompressed, I dumped the memory during playback and used VGMToolbox’s Finder to extract multiple SEQ files from it.
One of them turned out to be the currently playing BGM’s SEQ, so I used it along with the RPG.VB and VH files to create a PSF.
I repeated this process for all 33 SEQ files. Once again, thank you so much—I really appreciate it.
Good job indeed! Given that you've achieved this, perhaps you should consider uploading your PSF set to https://vgm-upload.hcs64.com while following the guidelines listed here, as to help other listeners so they don't have to follow the same (seemingly repetitive) process :)