Entry 289

Open questions after the triage: sound, voices and movies

audiovideo

This entry answers the question left open by The Infection disc and what is on it, Sound banks, voice, music and cutscene audio, The game's sound in Rust: its driver, sequencer and synthesizer checked against the IOP modules, Voices and the title music in the runtime, The PSS movies: our own MPEG-2 decoder, exact against ffmpeg, played by the title, In-engine streams: the title's intro, event 1's cutscenes and the Audio screen's movies, bit for bit, The Audio screen's movies: ccSndMoviePlayer holds the desktop music around the stream, Mac Anu's music: ccSndSQLoad's town case and ccSndBgmCtrl's, The opening arc's cutscenes as the game presents them: subtitles, the music around the streams, and streams 5 and 10's effect tasks, English voices on a story start, and --voice en|jp, The field's voices and the skill words: ccVoiceRequest, ccWordsPlay and skillVoicePlay, The fights' voices: a skill request names its skill, and what else speaks in a fight, Data Drain: DataDrainMenu's frames, its rules answered by the field, and the drops handed out, The travellers' hum: tobjSeLoopStart and tobjSeLoop, "Every host call the scripts reach, and the sound instruction's eleven cases", "The scenes' own sounds: Mac Anu's canals, area 15's church, the breeder's tune; and the camera's wiped-out party", "The towns' gameStart and ccSndBgmCtrl: Mac Anu's crisis music and Dun Loireag's second sequence", "The fields' tables for all four volumes; xfer's layout pass and the misnamed tables it found", "The later volumes' sound tables: each disc's banks placed by its own executable", Mutation's saves, its voices, and the recall's black fades, Each disc file by file, and the four discs' unknowns, STRT.BIN played: the demo discs' screens, The executable's microcode names and .mwcats, the sound banks' unused parts, The later openings, libmpeg's frame base, and a line of size 0, The launcher opens on the logos, Mutation's stream effect tasks: the opening's text and eleven more, Stream 34's parts: Func_str1070 circling and rising objects, Each volume's animation-note sounds: setbl per volume, Outbreak's 21 party tables.

FilesUNKNOWNS.md

This entry closes the open questions of 28 entries about sound and pictures in motion: the sound banks, the driver and the music contexts, voices, the PSS movies and the in-engine streams. The triage of 2026-09-28 (UNKNOWNS.md) split every entry's open paragraph into single questions and checked each one against the later log, the docs and the code. The answered ones are listed below with their evidence. What is still open is restated at the end, with the entry that asked it, the play questions first. Open questions of these entries that belong to another subsystem are restated in that subsystem's entry: 282, 286, 288, 290 and 291.

Answered

  • 1: SNDDATA.BIN's format — answered by 14 / docs/formats/snddata.md
  • 1: ICON.BIN's format — answered by 16 (iconBinTbl, twelve icons) / docs/formats/save.md; noted in 239
  • 1: the voice banks' format — answered by 14 / docs/formats/voice.md
  • 1: BGM.BIN's format — answered by 14 / docs/formats/voice.md "Streamed music"
  • 1: the STREAM/ files' format — answered by 14 (Pcm chunks), 52 / docs/formats/ccs.md, docs/formats/voice.md
  • 1: whether OUTSIDE.BIN is read by anything — answered by 239 (no string OUTSIDE in any volume's code)
  • 1: what IOPRP243.IMG replaces in the IOP's ROM modules — answered by 239 / docs/disc/layout.md "The IOP image" (15 ROMDIR modules)
  • 14: the .sq MIDI content, and which sequence of a bank the jukebox plays — answered by 42 (the sequencer) / crates/piney-data/src/sound/mod.rs Tables::wave_sequence (1 for rows 47, 27 and 7)
  • 14: the sound-effect maps (seData, the SE tables, strSndTbl) — answered by 42, 81 / docs/engine/sound.md; 243 notes the question was stale
  • 14: what parodyFlag changes in ccEvVoiceRequest — answered by 95 / docs/formats/voice.md (events 0-49 have no voice in Parody Mode)
  • 14: the Pcm chunk's type, bitNum and trackType — answered by 245 (Decode_Pcm uses only dataNum and dataSize)
  • 42: the field, town, dungeon and event music contexts, and battle-music switching — answered by 60, 185 (towns), 80 (battle music; docs/engine/sound.md, bgmChange)
  • 42: voice lines, cutscene PCM, the 3D sound effect API — answered by 46, 95 (voices), 52 (stream PCM), 81 (ccSeOn3D)
  • 46: the logos, OPENING.PSS and the intro stream counted as played, and their audio — answered by 49, 52
  • 46: the field's voices (ccVoiceRequest's negative ids, per-character voices) — answered by 95, 101
  • 46: the title's lit icons differing from the CPU GS model — answered by 47 (the directional term was doubled)
  • 49: the other volumes' movies — answered by 245 (later_openings_match_ffmpeg_exactly)
  • 52: the streams' effect objects and effect tasks (StreamDemoFuncTbl) — answered by 54, 57, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 133, 156, 160
  • 52: the subtitles under a stream — answered by 85
  • 52: the sequenced music around a stream (ccSndStreamCtrl) — answered by 85; per volume by BUGS.md (stream_ctrl takes the volume)
  • 60: ccSndBgmCtrl's branches for town types 1-4 — answered by 185 (types 1 and 3 start sequence 2 with three sequences; every town sequence 0)
  • 60: the crisis flag ccSnd +0x105 and the three-sequence condition — answered by 185
  • 85: streams in The World (the town and field hosts) — answered by 90, 91
  • 85: stream 5's eight hit marks (effHitMarkStr) — answered by 122, 131
  • 85: the view's clip at divZ — answered by 153
  • 85: the arc's other nine effect tasks — answered by 121, 122, 124, 126
  • 95: the fights' calls (Event::SkillWords) not wired — answered by 101
  • 95: Kite calling the party's strategy (Show::Shout) — answered by 120
  • 101: Kite's strategy balloon and the party's chat lines — answered by 120, 123
  • 102: the Data Drain movie — answered by 105
  • 102: the side effect's visuals (effSkillStartEffect, the fly fonts, effAfterDrain) — answered by 141
  • 102: the noise (MenuNoise) — answered by 104
  • 102: the enemy's drained form after affect 13 — answered by 229
  • 150: TOBJ's shadow (ccShadowModel) — answered by 160
  • 188: the voices across volumes (the EvVoice groups per volume) — answered by 226, 227
  • 203: each later volume's ccEvVoiceRequest groups — answered by 226 (each disc's own, decoded)
  • 203: Mutation's ccVoiceRequest cases — answered by 227 (Mutation's field voices, food and skill words)
  • 203: Outbreak's and Quarantine's setbl rows and their ccSeSetParam* — answered by 278 (notes_are_the_volumes_own)
  • 203: whether ccSndStreamCtrl's stream numbers changed — answered by BUGS.md (stream_ctrl takes the volume; the_later_volumes_music_around_the_streams)
  • 226: Mutation's field, skill and food voices — answered by 227
  • 226: Mutation's BOSSTALK.BIN — answered by 227, 239 (only Outbreak's disc carries it)
  • 239: what STRT.BIN's scenes look like — answered by 240 (STRT.BIN played: the demo discs' screens)
  • 267: Func_str1070 — answered by 269
  • 267: str7100, str8800 and str0300 changed on Mutation — answered by 271 (they are Infection's code)
Still unknown
  • (play) [[58]]: SoundFadeOut stops every sequence at once (crates/piney-game/src/main.rs maps it to bgm_stop), where the game's ccSoundFadeOut fades over 8 frames — every mode change that fades the music. - (play) [[96]]: the gate hack's cancel: ccSndGateHackCtrl restarts sequences 0 and 2 at volume 0 and fades them in; the port fades them from where they are (docs/engine/field-ui.md) — cancelling a gate hack. - (play) [[89]]: changing Voice in The World's Options goes through SoundEnv, which carries the volumes only; the driver may not follow until the next mode — the voice language option in the field. - (volumes) [[203]]: Outbreak's and Quarantine's ccVoiceRequest cases; [[227]] leaves their spcVoiceData to be checked. - (volumes) [[278]]: who ids 18-20 are on Outbreak and Quarantine (ccCharBaseParam.id rows) and their tables' sounds; [[239]] names charTbl rows 18-20 (Tsukasa, Subaru, Sora), the sound tables are not followed. - (volumes) [[267]], [[269]], [[271]]: Outbreak's and Quarantine's versions of the stream effect tasks Mutation changed (Func_str1070, str7100, str8800, str0300) are not compared. - [[14]]: the 48 kHz rate of the PCM paths rests on the SPU2's fixed input rate and on measurements, not on anything the code states (docs/formats/voice.md Unknown). - [[14]], [[243]]: the SPU2's exact ADPCM rounding; the port rounds as PCSX2 (docs/formats/snddata.md Unknown). - [[42]]: the SPU2 itself (envelope timing, ENVX/ENDX, interpolation, reverb) is taken from documentation, not hardware (docs/engine/sound.md Unknown). - [[42]]: sdCommand's reverb switches (cases 4 and 5): who asks for them (docs/engine/sound.md Unknown). - [[56]]: what ccSnd +98 (set by mode 0) does, and whether mode 1 clears it. - [[56]]: the port-0 branch of the volume (the SE volume, sign-extended from 24 bits) is not modelled on its own. - [[184]]: what ccSnd +0x110 is (docs/engine/sound.md Unknown). - [[95]]: vBank+0x08 is left as evVoicePlay last wrote it; the port sends none. - [[50]]: the load-confirmation jingle's m_tempPN is never initialised (game UB); the port starts at 0. - [[176]]: whether the SE port's volume is ever below full when sound 8 0 256 runs. - [[245]]: whether a Recovery Drink used by Kite on Quarantine stops voice channel 0 on a console; the port follows the code (docs/formats/voice.md Unknown). - [[245]]: whether the other characters' skill-word bases reach their tables' last rows; only Kite's is traced. - [[112]]: sound bank 5 is read from the session's WORLD_MAN, which for the arena is area 27's. - [[101]]: a request the menus make reaches the sound task a frame after the game's (task order). - [[49]]: the IPU's exact IDCT arithmetic; needs a console. - [[49]]: what the SPU2 plays after the last audio block until audioDecReset. - [[49]]: how many frames the console takes before a movie's first picture. - [[52]], [[175]]: the frames the disc read and the decoding take are not modelled; the port reads ahead on a thread ([[175]]), where the game streams from disc as it plays. - [[52]]: the intro's end flash, drawn after stream 0, not over it, is placed 20 frames in by inference (docs/engine/title.md Unknown). - [[85]]: the exact frame ccEventStream's loop sees the stream end (docs/engine/stream.md Unknown). - [[133]]: how many frames the game loads between str0580 and str0581 (docs/engine/stream.md Unknown). - [[133]]: str0581's frame-0 note (cue 900), given to the task's second pass (docs/engine/stream.md Unknown). - [[269]]: whether OBJ_xpart00-05's models carry a bounding box (the game would drop parts the port keeps). - [[105]]: streams 37, 44, 67, 69 and 100 (a character's drain, by id) are not played (docs/engine/field-ui.md "Not yet known or not ported"). - [[240]]: which demo disc each STRT.BIN scene belonged to, and how its menus' selection worked; not in the files. - [[249]]: whether the four discs' LOGO_B.PSS and LOGO_C.PSS are the same file; the build's dedup would say. - [[52]]: the Audio screen's movies have no test of their own; [[56]] covers their music only. - [[267]]: no harness compares Mutation's changed stream tasks with the game's code frame by frame. - [[89]]: --voice is in no playthrough test. - [[60]], [[185]]: the music is not compared with the game playing, only the tables and the call order; Dun Loireag's sequence 2 is not listened to. - [[184]]: the canals' and the church's volumes against the game playing (docs/engine/sound.md Unknown). - [[150]]: the travellers' hum against the game.