ShapeFusion Won't Open M1A1's Sound File

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Coraxus
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Within the classic first Marathon file is a sound file that ShapeFusion is unable to open. I even tried to change the suffix from .sndz to .sndA but that file refuses to open. I scoured the internet looking for an alternative utility to open that particular file. I have no other problem opening the sound files from the other two Marathon games with ShapeFusion. Is this a ShapeFusion bug or is the fault like within the M1A1's sound file itself?
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Pfhorrest
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Are you sure you're opening up M1A1's Sounds, and not just M1's sounds? M1A1 was a port of M1 to the M2/Infinity formats that were all Aleph One could handle back then, but now Aleph One can handle the original file formats (and that's what's distributed on the site for M1 now), so perhaps that's what you've got that, which ShapeFusion probably isn't compatible with.

You might need to grab an old original Marathon sound editor (and run that in an emulator because it'll have been written for System 7 back in the day), unless anyone else knows of a better solution.
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I downloaded the game from Aleph One's website whose recent version was 1.2.1. It's a self-contained game app just like the other two Marathon games.
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The Man
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That is not M1A1. M1A1 was replaced on the Aleph One website with the original Marathon 1 data files several years ago, so SF won’t be able to read them. M1A1 is still available somewhere; I’ll edit it into this post in a moment.

edit: I think this is them, hopefully.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit

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Thanks. And given the suffix, it looks like this might work. :3
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The Man
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No problem. M1A1 was how I most recently accessed M1’s graphics and sounds as well; I just can’t recall for certain that the link above is the one I used, but I think it was. I certainly have the requisite files on my computer that I can upload somewhere if needed.

Failing that, I also have an image of SheepShaver I can send you that, depending on your OS, will at least boot up, though it won’t run M1 for very long without soft-locking. However, you should be able to use that to run M1 editors.

In any case, good luck. If you have any further problems, let us know and I’m sure someone will be able to help (it may or may not be me, depending upon when you post about them).
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit

Last.fm · Marathon Chronicles · Marathon Eternal 1.2 · Where Monsters Are in Dreams · YouTube Vidmaster’s Challenge
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I was trying to tinker around with modding sound effects and stuff. Apparently the file that I downloaded seems to be structured the same way as all the other ones. Incidentally, I did earlier before tried to use one of them as a sort of "plugin" of sorts just to see how it turned out. What I learned is what I was afraid I'd expect. With the exception of the music, all sound effects when silent. I had the modded sound file put in the same directory as the original that the game came with. I wonder if there is something else I have to do if I wanna have the Marathon Classic use alternative SFX.
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The Man
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So you're trying to alter M1's sound effects and use them in-game? It's possible A1 dislikes the mixing and matching. One of the devs would be more qualified to speak on this matter than I am.

It's also possible that the current build of SF doesn't play well with M1A1's sounds. It throws up a warning about mismatches between 8-bit and 16-bit, right? It's possible that this is a major problem in M1A1's case. I can't remember if M1 handled 8-bit and 16-bit sounds differently than M2/Inf did.

If you can provide more info on what version of A1 you're running, what OS you're on, where you placed the sounds, whether you're using the all-in-one app, etc., that might help. And does using the unmodified M1A1 sounds with the other M1 files work?
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit

Last.fm · Marathon Chronicles · Marathon Eternal 1.2 · Where Monsters Are in Dreams · YouTube Vidmaster’s Challenge
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Well, as I stated before I'm playing version 1.2.1, which is an AIO app, but I've placed my modded .sndA file within where the original sound file "Sounds.sndz" is located. As for SF, it's version 0.6 and I'm running all of this on Mac OS X 10.8.6 Snow Leopard. But yes, I did get that message regarding the 8bit and 16bit error message. I haven't tested out the unmodded downloaded sound as of yet, but I can only guess that it may likely result in the same problems as before.
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In that case, editing the original files in SheepShaver or Basilisk II might be your best bet, though I would still try using the original M1A1 file and making sure there isn’t an issue with how SF edits it. I can upload a SheepShaver install that at least boots in 10.10.5 Yosemite; I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t run in Snow Leopard. (Again, problems keeping Marathon running, but they seem to be unrelated.) It also doesn’t play sound, which could be a problem, but if you know what sounds you want to place where, you should be fine; keeping file names clear should help. Where do you want it uploaded? Google Drive is probably most convenient on my end if you can let me know when you’ve grabbed the file.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit

Last.fm · Marathon Chronicles · Marathon Eternal 1.2 · Where Monsters Are in Dreams · YouTube Vidmaster’s Challenge
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In that case, I'll have to go with SheepShaver as that's what I got installed on my Mac right now. Though specifically Chubby Bunny. So does the site still host the download for the Mac Classic version of M1A1, or should I go to another site to do that? Also, what utility app would I need to download to run in SheepShaver so as to edit the sound file?
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ravenshining
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I don't think you'll be able to get an M1A1 sounds file to work with M1, they use different formats and most likely different indexes.

To edit the M1 sounds file, use MacBinary III and ResEdit. M1 stored sounds in the sounds file's resource fork as plain old System 7 sound resources. That won't work properly on most modern filesystems, so it's been MacBinary'd for Aleph One. Maybe on a Mac you might be able to un-macbinary it by adding a .bin suffix and running through whatever MacOS uses for an archive utility these days, I don't know, otherwise do that with MB III in BII or SS.

M1A1 - the most recent version with all the extra bits hacked out - may be found here:
https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/data-m1a1

And, if you're interested, you might like to check out my M1R project here:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R
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This is the file in question:
Sounds.zip
(742.88 KiB) Downloaded 265 times
By default it bares a generic document blank icon. At most I can change the suffix from ".sndz" to ".sndA" and its icon would change accordingly and by adjusting the mml script to match the file name, I can play the game with sound effects working properly. However, attempting to open it with SF yields an error message.

Incidentally, I tried playing the game selecting the M1A1 Sounds.sndA downloaded from the internet without modifying it whatsoever as its source and I just get silence as I have done before. I tried to open Sound.snz through ResEdit and MacBinary but I had no success there either.
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Pfhorrest
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When you're playing M1 only the actual M1-format sound file (the one that starts off named ".sndz") will actually work with the other files, so that's why the M1A1 Sounds.sndA file doesn't work. The different format is also why SF won't open it (and changing the file suffix doesn't actually change the format; there's no reason you'd want to do that, and you're probably just luck that AO is smart enough to realize that the file you renamed .sndA is actually a .sndZ file and read it accordingly).
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ravenshining
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Strange, for whatever reason the sounds file posted won't un-binary. Try this one - unzip it and it will work with A1. If you then strip off the .sndz so it's Sounds.bin, drop that on MacBinary, then open the resulting Sounds file in ResEdit, you should get a snd resource.
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Sounds.bin.sndz.zip
(742.5 KiB) Downloaded 260 times
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I've downloaded that file and extracted it. So far, it looks like I'm able to open it up with ResEdit, (and Rezilla for that matter). Even though it was a generic blank document with no suffix, I was able to get it to work when I placed it directly in the Data Files folder. One thing I did notice you did something very different was that you had the .bin format precede the .sndz which makes me wonder if that was what caused it to work.

I've also noticed that all the other essential files for the Classic Marathon is also behaving in the same way as well, so I wonder if how you formatted that sound file may also work with the other ones as well. WIth that said, the only caveate is trying to input my own custom sounds into the new file through ResEdit (or Rezilla) almost blindly since I can't use SF's friendly interface to properly navigate and import the wave sound files I have.
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