Audio Tools
ACM plug-in for Winamp
In Fallout, sound and music files are stored in Interplay ACM format. This proprietary audio format is also used in many other games: Baldur's Gate, MDK 2, Planescape, etc.
A brief and rather outdated description of the ACM format can be found here (both English and Russian languages).
ACM input plug-in for Winamp allows playing of ACM files directly from Winamp.
It is possible that the plug-in is compatible with some other sound players with Winamp plug-in support. For example, XMPlay works with ACM plugin just fine.
ACM2WAV
To convert an ACM file into standard Windows WAV, acm2wav program can be used:
N.B. the sound effects and speech files in Fallout are mono. To convert them correctly, use -m option in the command line of acm2wav.
SND2ACM
Reverse conversion can be preformed with snd2acm tool. This program can use WAV of RAW sound files as input.
REGSND
All sound effects in Fallout 2 are located in the sound\sfx\ directory, and indexed in sound\sfx\sndlist.lst file.
Here is an excerpt from TeamX Audio & Video Journal, issue #2:
sndlist.lst list is a text file with the following structure:
- First line - number of ACM files in the list.
- Then the sound-file descriptions are given, 4 lines for each file:
- File name with extension.
- Length of ACM-file.
- Sound length, in bytes (taking into consideration that the sound in ACM-files is 16-bit, sound length equals the count of samples in the file multiplied by 2).
- Doubled sequence number of the file.
All descriptions are sorted by file name (sorting is case-insensitive).
If some description is inaccurate, Fallout can refuse to play the corresponding sound.
Testings show that the following points are critical in the sense of playing:
- count of files in the list should be the same as in the first line states;
- file names must be sorted;
- sound lengths should be correct.
It seems that correct sequence-number does not matter, incorrect file-lengths are also tolerated (at least if the specified file-size is greater than real one, the sound will be played).
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REGSND program updates sndlist.lst with information about new and changed ACMs automatically.
Please note that deleted ACMs are not traced by the utitity and should be removed from the list manually.
© 2004 Return 0; projects
Last modification: 09 July 2004