Balls of Steel

Seldon · Post by **Seldon** » Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:03 pm

There is a thread about Duke Nukem Forever, and words "Balls of Steel" appeared there. That reminded me about great pinball game titled the same, so I decided to refresh my memory and play a little. It's very good game, I especialy enjoy the soundtrack. And here comes my problem: I'd love to extract music from it. I tried Game Extractor and Fast Module Extractor, but except for few wav's with sound effects I had no luck. I suspect music is stored in some module format.
Does anyone can give me some advice in this matter?

DrMcCoy · Post by **DrMcCoy** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 12:01 am

Dunno about that particular game, but back in the days I used a neat little tool named mripper (multi ripper) to extract music and stuff from games and demos.

No idea if you can still find it on the net. If not, I might still have it one of my HDs somewhere...

EDIT: You can actually still find it, apparently, even a later version than the one I used: http://www.baccan.it/index.php?sezione=mripper

Seldon · Post by **Seldon** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:56 am

As a matter of fact I have multiripper somewhere too. I haven't thought about it, but maybe it will work - I have to try. But as I recall, it's pretty old software, capable of ripping old Amiga modules in different variations. Balls of Steel is a newer (sort of - it's from 1997) Windows game, with 16-bit sound. But I'll try anyway. Thank's for advice.

john_doe · Post by **john_doe** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 7:02 pm

I've made a little extractor for the BNK files. I only tested it with darkside.bnk which comes with the demo. It's a console program and you'll need to give the filename of the BNK file to extract. The files will be extacted into the current directory. Source (C++ and DevCpp project) is included.
(Xentax seems to be down so I uploaded it to sendspace instead...)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fbd2nm

However it seems there are no usable music files (Mod, Xm etc.) there, either they are compressed again or custom or in another file.

Seldon · Post by **Seldon** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:10 pm

Thanks for the reply. I already figured out how to extract files from the .bnk file. The music is in .ADP files which are compressed with some ADPCM variant, but I'm not sure how exactly. I opened one of them in sound editor as Dialogic VOX ADPCM file. However it doesn't sound correct. There is no noise, but volume changes are incorrect, occasionally occurs clipping, and visually looking at the waveform, it appears as an artifact at very low frequency (some 0,1 Hz) and high amplitude is applied at the original waveform (I'm not sure if I expressed myself clearly).
I'd be very grateful for any further assistance.