Crash Bandicoot 1/2/3 (PSX) - NSF/NSD File Archives

[keystothemaxim]

I've been trying to recreate the music in Crash. I extracted the .mid files and they sound okay, but the hard part is actually placing the soundfont for each song in the midi tracks so you can listen to the song exactly as it sounds in the games.

Each level has its own instrument samples (you can hear and convert them to WAV using PSound). Extracting them and placing them in a DAW such as FL Studio does not yield 100% accurate results.

There's a person on YouTube who has made a pretty damn good Crash Bandicoot soundfont, but some instruments are missing and, again, the sound is not entirely accurate when applied to a midi, even if you choose the correct sound banks.

In Game Boy Advance games, there's a method of extracting a midi, then a soundfont, and then putting them together, which works great. Now we need to find how PSX's midi sequencer (or, at least, the one in Crash games) works.

EDIT: Will this method work? I cannot try it at the moment. viewtopic.php?f=29&t=9880

[chekwob]

That VGMTrans program seems to work well if you extract the SEQ and VAB with crashedit before-hand instead of letting it automatically find them in the NSF file; it seems to "find" some music that isn't actually music and then crashes when you try to play it.

CrashEdit actually has a "extract linked VAB as DLS" option on music entries, though it is rather broken:

• DLS file is broken in some way and needs to be opened and resaved through awave studio to work
• Volume on the instruments seems to be really loud
• Whatever ADSR envelope something or other is not copied over or something, I seriously have no idea how that stuff works, but as a result some sounds don't fade in or out the way they would in-game

But other than that, the frequencies and ranges for all of the notes should be good. Probably better off using VGMTrans, though.

[Kedde]

Hi there!

First of all, such an amazing job on this subject! I have always been a huge fan of the first Crash Bandicoot games and always wondered if it indeed would be possible someday to customize things.

I have a very general wondering though. How do you manage to get the games to work? I mean, my first step was to just try to replace the first level in Crash Bandicoot 2 with (in this example) level 7 - so basically copy/paste and rename. I then packed it to a ISO, but it won't load in ePSXe. I believe there has to made some sort of check for the real image file - and this is clearly not.
How do you fix this issue? I know I am missing something really simple and logic here...

[chekwob]

Hi there!

First of all, such an amazing job on this subject! I have always been a huge fan of the first Crash Bandicoot games and always wondered if it indeed would be possible someday to customize things.

I have a very general wondering though. How do you manage to get the games to work? I mean, my first step was to just try to replace the first level in Crash Bandicoot 2 with (in this example) level 7 - so basically copy/paste and rename. I then packed it to a ISO, but it won't load in ePSXe. I believe there has to made some sort of check for the real image file - and this is clearly not.
How do you fix this issue? I know I am missing something really simple and logic here...

It was probably a mistake to add .ISO to the file types filter in ePSXe since the emulator doesn't actually support normal ISO's like that. The deal is it really only takes a raw disc image (generally these come with the extension .BIN or .IMG) which is similar to an ISO but also contains CDROM sector header and ECC/EDC data. Another issue is that the headers need to be formatted like a "MODE 2 FORM 1" track (which the playstation uses) which is different from the much more common "MODE 1" that is generally used.

Basically, when you burn an ISO it essentially gets converted into a MODE 1 .BIN as it is burned. Whatever image creator you use will need to be able to create BIN's directly instead of ISO's, and it will also need to be able to use "MODE 2 FORM 1" instead of "MODE 1". It's all really a pain, and I plan to add a feature to CrashEdit that will just turn a folder directly into a BIN ready to play on emulator or burn for console just because it's so complicated.

Other than that, it should mostly work, but you will run into another problem where the level won't actually play. Switching level ID's around like that is sort of involved, a copy of the level ID is present in the NSD file and you'll need to change it in a hex editor (manually, patch NSD doesn't do it yet) for the level to even load. Once that works, there can still be issues depending on which ID's you switched. As an example, if you take Turtle Woods and give it an ID for another level, you might find that the game freezes whenever you touch the mud, just because crash's code will do checks like "is this level ID 1F? well then I need to do (something to prepare things for mud to work properly)", and the new level ID might not fit the same checks. Another more obvious one is if you swap the title screen (3C) with a level, the level starts immediately after the playstation logo (3C is hardcoded to be the first NSF to "run"), but things like pressing triangle to view the fruit/life/box counters or even just opening the pause menu might not work at all, several death animations won't run, maybe crash is immune to certain types of damage, etc.

[ManDude]

Hey there (I was able to register, yay), I am having some problems with modding Piston it Away, I want to make the player spawn at the end and leave the level at the start, but moving obj_willy does not make him spawn there (everything else can be freely moved). In levels with multiple warp ins (Road to Ruin, Snow Go, Air Crash), moving willy (not obj_willy#2 or sthg, just willy) does move his warping spot too, but when entering from the secret warp (Edit: No it does not.) So where is Crash's main spawning point specified? I thought the NSD but I don't have the guts to see it.

Oh and in Tiny's boss fight in Crash 3, there is an entity called "tiny-tiger" and another one called "tiny-generator". What could this mean? I don't think it's related to the lions.

[Mystie]

Every time I try to open an .nsf with this tool, on all three games, it always gives me this error message:

"Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately."

Why does this happen?

[ManDude]

You probably have a corrupted version of the game, or maybe it's the region of the file. What is the region of the games you extracted the NSFs from?

[ManDude]

<The content of this post has been removed by the author.>

[Mystie]

You probably have a corrupted version of the game, or maybe it's the region of the file. What is the region of the games you extracted the NSFs from?

I am using the NTSC-U/C versions, and accessing the files straight from the discs.

[chekwob]

You probably have a corrupted version of the game, or maybe it's the region of the file. What is the region of the games you extracted the NSFs from?

I am using the NTSC-U/C versions, and accessing the files straight from the discs.

Try copying the files off the disc onto your hard drive and then opening the copies. If that doesn't work, I'll need more details on the exception.

[ManDude]

@Mystie Try deactivating anti-virus and open CrashEdit (then activate anti-virus again, of course), if that doesn't work then daww.

Anyway, I just decided to take a crack at Crash 1 Prototype's objects n crap, and I actually got further than I thought (in less time than I thought too), it helps that each crate is ~28 bytes in size (which is like, a fifth when compared to Crash 2's). Here's what I got - hopefully this can be helpful to some of you (this is the first bounce box, the nearest one from Crash):

<updated image below>

I STILL haven't found object type/subtype though, and I can't believe it's not some of the first bytes in there (before the ID, though they are probably the ones right before the x-coordinates). I'll probably update this post with info on it minutes after posting it. Hehe.

EDIT: Yup, I was right:



I replaced the 22 06 bytes before the x-coordinates to 00 00 (which happens to be Crash's object). 22 happens to be 34 in hex, and 06 is, well, 6 in hex, and type 34 subtype 6 is also a bounce box (which is the box I used to test) in other Crash games. Now this is progress. Updated first image too. Now I need to see how the ! box works (how does it say which box is triggered in only that space?), problem is, it will be quite hard finding where the box is.

EDIT 2: I found another thing related to boxes, updated first image again.

EDIT 3: I found more stuff. Here's an updated version of the 1st image:

(NOTE: This image is for CRATES. Settings marked as yellow, grey and cyan may mean other stuff in other kinds of objects.)

By the way, crates in Crash 1 (at least in the prototype) don't seem to have "states" like they do in the sequels, so to make ghost crates you need to use subtype 13, and the reward value determines what box it turns into. Though, The Lost City has some invisible crates that turn into bounce ones (that don't work properly), so I'll have to take a look at that sooner or later.

EDIT 4: The third and 4th setting (grey and cyan) can also be used to change the potency of arrow boxes.

[ManDude]

Also, there is a slight difference between Crash 1 pickups/crates and Crash 2 pickups/crates, which is their origin point:

• For crates, it's their bottom-left-back point (which makes sense).
• For pickups, it's their center.

I suppose this is enough Crash 1 support. The Prototype is EXACTLY like the retail versions (I tested all 3, all work the same way) too.

[lionheartuk]

Was there ever a version of crashEdit released above v0.10 at all or is that still the most recent version?

[chekwob]

Was there ever a version of crashEdit released above v0.10 at all or is that still the most recent version?

There's this: http://cheek.us.to/CrashEdit.zip
It's newer, but I never set a version number for it. It was just supposed to be a temporary holdover until the next proper version, but that's ended up taking a long time.

[ManDude]

Anyone having problems going to http://www.sites.google.com/site/crashpsxsite/structure? The site seems to be down. Could anyone get me Ruination's ID? I need to restart that level. EDIT: Nevermind, it's 0F (I got it first try lol).