"HISTORY"

History

The post-postgame chapter.

After completing the game, I had the desire to rip its soundtrack, only to find out that:

  1. they can not be played conventionally,
  2. they are barely audible when played raw, and
  3. existing solutions were either bare or inaccessible.

So--as usual--I decided to make my own. This time however, I went with the C programming language for the first time outside of school,[a] after observing many similar projects. Then again, some are being rewritten in [Rust]. Am I too late?

On 03/28/2023, I uploaded a [video recording] of the decoder showcasing its looping capabilities. In its description, I said to check back here by week's end for the public release. Sorry it took a while. I got sick some time after the video, followed by the usual episodes of depression. I did work on my web projects--which were lighter on myself--during those periods before resuming in mid-April.

While the main goal is to be able to rip the game soundtrack, I also wanted to get a genuine start with C while simultaneously maturing my code which includes a tiny commons library. As with all recent projects, working iterations were repeatedly refactored until no more could be done.

Since I was making command-line applications, I took this opportunity to update my Java counterparts. I also updated [Pnic] to fix a minor bug I encountered when using [KESIMATE] for positional and size calculations.

While making the prober, I added a bit of Lemina and Ronfar to vary the error message of having too many options. They are the easiest in-game characters to create speeches for. The prober covered the final parts of development before the initial release on 05/05/2023.

Naturally, I went to test everything outside Debian. For Windows via Mingw-w64 and Wine, an alternative header file must be included for byte order conversions, while everything else works. Meanwhile, the Bionic C library on Android 11 was older than expected, as flushing an input stream returns a bad file descriptor error. Revision 2 ignores this, and otherwise works on Android 11 via Termux.

The 16-bit extension introduced in Revision 3 began as "what a waste of bytes!" Implementing it meant fixing my mistake of hard-coding the transcode library to skip the padding bytes and treat samples as bytes. This somehow led me to my first unit tests in years.

The playback helper script introduced with Revision 3 started in my phone as a preserved long chain of commands to reduce the use of its touch keyboard. Later, the idea of a playback helper script became clear, and work on it moved to the Latitude 5480.

  1. where I received very little instruction on.