Continued F2 at the site the previous page named as the first thing to do.
dat/sound.pak is a 114 KB index over ~1 GB of payload across sound.p00-p04.
Its 9519 entries carry no readable signature at all: the most common
first-four-bytes pattern is "...." on 3830 entries and no entry begins with
an ASCII magic. Exactly one entry is under 4 KB (#9454, 533 bytes), where a
bank header or wave index would be small and structured.
So the SE bank's metadata is not reachable as a header in sound.pak. The
entries are audio payload, high-entropy by nature, and a gain beside a wave
index is not sitting in front of them.
Stated as a negative about REACHABILITY, not existence: a per-wave gain
could live inside a container these entries are compressed into and I have
not decompressed one.
Two of three sites now checked, both negative; the executable around
sub_821C5580 remains. Classification unchanged at undecodable-with-reach,
but better bounded.
Records the shape the answer is taking: if the executable also has no
per-cue gain, the honest conclusion is that the game does not author a
per-cue mix at all and the levels come from the user-facing sound options
screen as runtime state. That makes the port's job authoring a master
balance rather than transcribing a table -- undecodable rather than
decoded, which it must know, because a mix authored in ignorance and one
authored deliberately look identical in the file and differ entirely in how
far they can be trusted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jc4pciRArGHfxGGhEbwp5t
0f0c6610c4