beta 5 - no mask hints

[Viniter]

Hey there, I just tried running the Beta 5 Linux build from the releases page. Seems to work fine except I'm not getting any masks hints.

Mask appears, but no audio plays and the cutscene ends immediately afterwards. Same behaviour with Aku Aku and Uka Uka characters. None of the hints seem to play.

Tested on Fedora 44, kernel 7.0.10-201.fc44.x86_64

Here's the recording of the behaviour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVgt5aZIeVM

And here's a debug replay, in case it's helpful (not sure the inputs are going to sync up if it plays the hints on your end):

ctr-163354.zip

Also, is there any list of known issues anywhere? I didn't find anything, so sorry if this is a known thing.

[pizzadude]

You need to dump the game with "dumpsxiso" from https://github.com/Lameguy64/mkpsxiso and then the mask hints and audio will work.

[Viniter]

You need to dump the game with "dumpsxiso" from https://github.com/Lameguy64/mkpsxiso and then the mask hints and audio will work.

Ah, okay, that worked. I just used whatever ISO reader I already had on hand, didn't know that mattered. This should probably be mentioned in the Readme.

Or it might be a good idea to include file checksums and verify the assets on launch. I can see this messing people up when it goes public, especially if the game boots up alright just with some missing audio.

I let you decide if you want to close this issue or reclassify it as a feature request.

[aalhendi]

Thank you for the write up and I am glad the issue is resolved. I'll explore possible solutions to avoid this reoccurring with others.

[bradnak]

Just as an aside, I used ctr-extractor, which was listed as being designed to work with this project. It wasn't until I used dumpsxiso that the XA audio functioned correctly despite my ROM being MD5-validated and the files being extracted. I assume that whatever ctr-extractor uses under the hood isn't extracting the XA files properly either. I'll file an issue report there as well.

[bradnak]

The ctr-extractor has now pushed an update to fix the issue extracting XA files. chanunnaki/ctr-extractor@36596a9

[DCxDemo]

Just as an aside, I used ctr-extractor, which was listed as being designed to work with this project. It wasn't until I used dumpsxiso that the XA audio functioned correctly despite my ROM being MD5-validated and the files being extracted. I assume that whatever ctr-extractor uses under the hood isn't extracting the XA files properly either. I'll file an issue report there as well.

Just want to note, that people here will not be able to help you with outside projects, despite being listed as compatible or anything.
There is iso-rebuild from ctr-tools repo is a simple BAT script that wraps mkpsxiso, works locally and is very transparent about what it's doing. It was designed to rebuild an iso for modding purposes and it still works fine.

The underlying issue is incorrect CDXA form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#CD-ROM_XA_extension

Form1 contains 2048 bytes of data and the rest is used for checksum.
Form2 uses the "large" checksum space to store additional audio data, thus it contains 2324 bytes of audio data instead.

So data files must be extracted in Form1 and audio files must use Form2.
A mixup leads to incorrect data extraction. More often it happens with audio, but sometimes with game data as well.