closing Q8
Last iteration I named Pj_Silph.xgs as the route to the SE cue index, on
the reasoning that XACT keeps cue->wave there. That route is dead, and
the negative is properly bounded: its 533-byte entry is high entropy with
no XGSF magic, +/-8 KB around it has none either, all 1.08 GB of
sound.pak contains zero XGSF, SDBK and WBND, and the executable has no
XACT or .xgs string anywhere. Control run first -- the same scan finds
RIFF in BGM_001 exactly where the bank structure says it should be, so
the scan works and the magic genuinely is not there.
So the .xgs and .slb extensions came from the authoring tool and survived
into shipped data that is not XACT at all. That goes in METHOD as a
general trap: check for the magic before committing to a parser for the
format an extension advertises. Writing an XACT parser would have been
wasted work.
What that leaves for the SE audio is undecodable-with-reach rather than
pending: Static.slb has no wave boundaries, there is no project file, and
none of the sound table's five records carries an offset. The bank is
certainly the right one -- 8 353 472 bytes over 322 cues is 0.84 to 1.01
seconds each at the bitrates the disc uses elsewhere, exactly the shape
of a bank of short effects. Only the index into it is missing, and it
exists only at runtime.
Q8 closes: vocabulary and bank decoded, the event binding a name match on
the authors' own event names, and the audio explicitly something the port
must source or author rather than extract. With this every MISSION row is
answered.
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