Unfortunately, the Nucleus demo and Photonix tool do not use the Soundsmith format for their music. Instead they use a proprietary format. I decided to reverse engineer this format as well and make a player for them as well.
We, of course, start with loading the boot block:
./disasm nucleus.2mg 800 0 1 > boot.s
Which lets us discover the loader is in blocks 7—b.
./disasm nucleus.2mg 9600 7 4 > loader.s
The loader uses a table starting at $9607, where the first word is the
starting block, the second word is the number of blocks, followed by a dword
loading address. It repeats until the starting block has the high bit
set. Nucleus does not use any compression for its data.
Using this, we discover the music player, which will let us discover where all the music data and wavebanks are located. (It will also be the thing I study the most in order to write a player).
./disasm nucleus.2mg 81000 333 4 > player.s
The sound player is more akin to MIDI than a tracker. The songs are broken into channels, each channel controlling 4 oscillators. There aren’t any patterns, there’s just a long list of note frequencies and note lengths for each channel. This means each channel has its own play head, only advancing to the next note when the note length elapses. Each channel loops independently as well.
The first time the player initializes, it loads a wavebank from $4/0000 into
sound RAM. Then all future initializations load a wavebank from $3/0000.
This means we have two wavebanks, one for the intro song, and the other for all
the main songs in the demo. I use the table from the loader to determine which
blocks are loaded for each memory location.
./decrunch nucleus.2mg 140 128 intro.wb raw ./decrunch nucleus.2mg 12 128 main.wb raw
The player uses a block of data located at $8/0300 to determine all sorts of
information about the songs and their channels. I’ll be calling it songdefs.
./decrunch nucleus.2mg 268 2 songdefs raw
This file is divided into chunks. Each chunk is 256 bytes long, and contains information about a song. So the first chunk contains information about the intro song. The second chunk contains information about the first main song, and so on. Using this we can determine there is 1 intro song, and 3 main songs.
Each chunk contains instrument data for each channel, as well as where in memory to find the note data for that song, as well has the playback speed.
The word at offset $44 in the chunk determines where the note
data for that specific song is located, inside bank 8. Using this we can
extract the note data for all the songs.
./decrunch nucleus.2mg 284 8 intro.song raw ./decrunch nucleus.2mg 270 14 main1.song raw ./decrunch nucleus.2mg 292 7 main2.song raw ./decrunch nucleus.2mg 299 2 main3.song raw
I’ll also divide up the songdefs file to provide easy access to each song’s instrument data.
dd if=songdefs bs=256 skip=0 count=1 of=intro.inst dd if=songdefs bs=256 skip=1 count=1 of=main1.inst dd if=songdefs bs=256 skip=2 count=1 of=main2.inst dd if=songdefs bs=256 skip=3 count=1 of=main3.inst
And that’s all there is to it.
Photonix was extracted in a similar way.