Sega Saturn Guides: Creating Saturn Undubs

Burning Rangers is used as an example.

How to patch:

In case it's useful to anyone, this is how you swap music tracks on a game
with an ACX soundtrack and play it on real hardware. The ACX is a
container/archive file that (for our purposes) contains ADX audio tracks. The
ADX file is also a container file, which contains the audio data, the sample
rate, and any looping data (if the track is intended to loop).

In the case of Burning Rangers (and likely others), the BGM.ACX contains the music,
and the ADX.ACX contains the voices and other sounds.

You will need:
Burning Rangers disc images in Japanese and English (or whatever game you're doing)
mkisofs (You can get it from here): http://smithii.com/cdrtools
ADX Tools (found under "Additional Tools"): http://shenmuesubs.sourceforge.net/download/
ADXPlay: http://web.axelero.hu/fka2636/adxplay_english.rar (to extract any of the
individual ADX tracks inside to wav for editing in Audacity)
Puyo Tools 2.0: http://code.google.com/p/puyotools/
(PT 2.0 is coming soon. I was using a preview version the author was kind enough to
send me, since the current stable release (1.0)has issues with creating ACX files.
2.0 will have bugfixes for ACX creation and block size)


How to burn an edited Saturn image so that it will play on real hardware:

I used these instructions:
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/sh ... post327152 (except I needed the IP.bin file in the same folder as mkisofs for it to work)

Except I used PowerISO, and I got my IP.BIN from here (since CDRWin won't see
my drives): http://phemusat.tripod.com/ by downloading the "SMS emu version 2"
file (it has the file inside the zip). I then grabbed the BGM file from the
Japanese version and pasted it into the US one, and burned the ISO using the
instructions above. The IP.bin is required to play on real hardware, and must be
added, because once you edit the disc image, the original IP.bin is lost.

If you want to swap a Japanese soundtrack for English or vice versa, it's a simple
copy and paste if the songs are in the same order (which you can verify with ADXPlay,
for example). If not, or if you want to add your own songs, you will need to extract
the ADX files with Puyo Tools (or another ADX app), and replace them with your own
tracks (preferably with the same or similar length, and looping where the original
did). Otherwise I'm sure unexpected results will occur (or maybe the track will
just keep playing til the stage/level changes?).

In the case of Burning Rangers, the English version has one additional track,
track #24, which is the Burning Rangers theme, but fades out at the chorus and
is 1:19 long. I took a copy of the Japanese theme (exported to wav) and editing
down to be the precise length of the English track, then added a fade-out using
Audacity (it's free), and then used the ADX encoder in ADX Tools to convert it
back to ADX format (you can also tell it to loop here if needed, but this track
didn't need it, as the original fades out rather than looping).

At this point, you're on the home stretch.

It's important to note that the ADX/ACX formats DO NOT store file names or file
extensions, so it doesn't matter what the files are called or how they're
numbered. I wish I'd known that before I renamed all 47 tracks by hand.

So now that you have your homemade ADX in hand, you want open Puyo Tools again
and under Archive choose Create. Then you'll want to choose ACX from the drop down,
and add your files. In the case of BR, I added the original batch of 46 files, then
opened the edited track 24 last, and then dragged it to right before the OTHER track
24 (see how not needing to rename the files is convenient?).

NOTE: Under Settings, you'll need to choose 2048 as the block size, and leave the
Compression drop down on "No Compression". Once you're ready, go ahead and create
the archive file, naming it "BGM.acx" and saving. I then went back and capitalized
the file extension, because I didn't want to take any chances.

Once you have your new ACX, you just go to your extracted ISO folder and paste it in
over the original BGM.ACX.

Please note that the track "We are Burning Rangers" in the demo screen will still be
in English. That's because it's in English on the Japanese version too. Nothing I can
do about that! :)

The final step for Burning Rangers is to replace the opening movie, which also has the
English song in it. Copy the OP.CAK file from the Japanese image to your extracted English
image, overwriting the original. You will lose the tiny bit of English text in the opening,
but it's only on the screen for a spilit second.

When you're all done, click "makeiso.bat" This will give you a new ISO with whatever name
you chose earlier.

Remember, ISO is fine for what we're doing. It doesn't need to be a bin/cue, since there
are no CD audio tracks.

If you're burning it for use on a real console, I recommend using high quality discs like
Taiyo Yudens. My crappy Imation CDs always skip on my Saturn, but the same image burn on a
TY disc plays perfectly (I actually had to back up Dark Savior from the retail disc to a TY
because the Saturn actually has an easier time playing the backup than the original...for
THAT, you do need a bin/cue). I burn mine at 16x (as that's the lowest my burner will allow)
and they work fine.

Enjoy your burning, and your rangering, and FLYYYY HIIIIIIIIIIIIGH!
- Billkwando


Annotations for experienced users

If you got an older writer, it may be necessary to convert your ISO to RAW
format first.
The CDR-Win help file lists the writers which require this. If you have one
of these,
you'll need to download the DOS-version called DAO. It employs a little tool
called
ISO2RAW which can do this conversion. You will need to change the cue sheet,
too. Replace
the MODE1/2048 with MODE1/2352 in this case.
If you got a file which is not named *.ISO you may be in need of a hex
editor to cut out
the additional data that the according program added to the file.
The start of a sega ISO is always "SEGA[blablabla]". So look out for this.
In most cases
the header is only about 128 or 256 bytes in size.
Nero for example (file extension NRG) adds 512 bytes, 128 in front of the
image, and
the remaining 384 bytes at the end.
Calculating these is easy: If you got the number of bytes at the start,
simply cut them
out and save the new file. Now calculate how many bytes at the end are
superfluous,
simply by calculating filesize-2048*(int(filesize/2048)).