I decided to have a look at my PDS discs, I’m trying to work out how to make a backup as my Disc 1 is screwing up, but failed miserably.
Well, I also remembered that it seems nobody has ripped the extended Guardian Dragon theme from Disc 2 yet, so I thought I’d have a look at that.
Now I believe that .epk is the disc’s audio file extension, but a search to find a player and/or converter has so far proved fruitless, so would anyone happen to know how I can take a look to see if these are indeed audio?
By the way, I heard one of the CPK converters could look at .epk as well, however I couldn’t get that thing working anyway.
I’ve just had a quick look at some of the .epk files, and realised that I’d done the same thing before while figuring out where all the different bits of the script are stored. As far as I can see, they’re files containing data (and possibly the code) for the cut-scenes that are done with in-game graphics. For instance, e014.epk is for the scene where Edge and Gash first talk (it contains the text “Is that… your dragon?”, and so on).
I vaguely remember that the three-digit numbers in the .epk filenames line up with the numbers in the .cpk filenames to signify the order they appear in in the game. Might be wrong though.
As for the game’s music, some or all of it is stored in the .seq files. A lot of these files are presumably just sound effects (“edge_se.seq”), so I thought I might be looking at the wrong extension, but then I noticed “townbgm.seq”, which is a bit of a giveaway.
Quite a while back, someone on the GameFAQs Saga board posted a program they’d written that could convert these files into normal midi files, but with a rather large problem. This was some time ago and I know almost nothing about digital audio, so this explanation may be woolly and/or wrong, but I seem to remember him saying that the .seq files contain only the data for things like the timing and pitch of the notes but not the instrument sounds that should be used to produce them. So the program just assigned any old instrument sounds when it extracted the music, which was at least amusing.
Did anyone else here read that thread? Anyone still have the program stored away somewhere?
It’s generally recommended that you use CDRWIN to back Saturn games up as bin/cue disc images (quick guide here).