ZenHAX

Hello! I've been stuck on this for a while now, and I've tried a lot of softwares with no success...

I want to rip the music from Dynasty Tactics 2 as they are some of the songs available on youtube but a lot are missing.
However I can't find a way to open the files in the iso as they have a very specific format of archive (I joined a picture to show them), and the programs I tried (like psound, cube media player, game extractor, etc) either can't find anything, find only the sfx, or find white noise.

What should I do? Is there a program I should try to rip them?
I don't know how to use hex editors so I may be way over my head ha ha but it doesn't hurt to ask. :]

I decided to take a look on this one and oh boy, does the proper *NS archive extraction for this game is quite hard. First of all, all of the *NS archives lacks TOC (Table of contents, which contains the offset address points of certain files inside the archive as well the sizes and if you're lucky, filenames) which means, it was hardcoded in the game's executable (SLUS_207.61), or so I thought.
After thorough checking the game's executable by using ps2dis disassembler tool, turns out it only contains the TOC for the CNS and DNS files (These two files contains videos for the cutscenes, intros, KOEI logos, etc.) while the TOC for ANS and BNS file cannot be found (Either they're using another method or something IDK, reading compiled MIPS codes without debug symbols is painful).

So, as a workaround you can try use VGMToolbox by scanning for a certain values inside the LINKDATA.ANS files directly (This is the one you want since all the audio stuff goes here, that includes the game's BGM). Here's settings you need to extracting the BGM files (Don't forget to copy that file off your disc to somewhere else first, by default it will extracts to the same directory):



Then, after you've done with the extraction, it's time to install foobar2000 and vgmstream plugin (or in foobar2000 terms: component) to play those extracted MIC files (install foobar first and then the plugin). After you've done, just drag the MIC files to foobar and play it.

*Note: First 8 tracks has two stereo tracks appended as surround audio. The game would switch these tracks depending on your situations during gameplay. I might need to create the necessary TXTP files to handle this (More info about vgmstream's TXTP).

Sorry for the late reply!

Thank you very much for your research! Indeed I would've never found the solution myself.

I will follow your instructions and reply with my results whenever I can (as I'm currently travelling)

Thank you so much again ^^

I did all the extracting necessary and it works perfectly! Though as you said there are those tracks with surround audio. I don't know how txtp files work for vgmstream... If you have a method so that I can maybe split the audio myself and you don't have to do extra work I would take it! Otherwise I can only wait for the TXTP file ha ha

Thank you again for your work, it's already amazing to have the game ost at such a good quality :]