SCI Resource ViewerHere is the SCI Resource Viewer program I was talking about. It'll view almost
any resources (including sound resources!) from pretty much
any SCI game out there. Straight from King's Quest IV all the way up to Torin's Passage, LSL7, Phantasmagoria I believe, and others.
This is a powerful tool for developers because it has several features that SCI Studio or SCI Companion doesn't have.
-The biggest one is the ability to preview sound resources. You can choose which PATCH to play them through (Tandy 3-voice, Adlib, Sound Blaster, MT-32, General MIDI (if the game supports it), PC Speaker, or even digital sound (again if the game or sound resources supports it) and after that you can choose which Windows MIDI interface you want to output it through. It also includes the loop trigger feature. Some sound resources in SCI games contain loop triggers that are used in conjunction with the game scripts to loop certain parts of a music theme while the game is busy doing something. Then when the game is finished it usually calls another sound resource and plays it. You really get the feel for how Sierra used their sound resources to their advantage. Almost as well as iMuse in LucasArts games. You can also save sound resources as MIDI files and save the digital audio sound resources as WAV files.
-It can view disassembled SCI scripts (for whoever can read them properly...I sure can't).
-It can view priority and control palettes of SCI1+ game picture resources.
-It's also a HECK of a lot more stable than SCI Studio could ever DREAM to be. that includes the unfinished VGA binaries.
There used to be a function in earlier releases to export resources in their native format but that seems to have since been removed for some reason. I seem to remember the author of the tool saying that it'll "try" to export resources in their native format with mixed results. Maybe he just never solved it.
Obviously the biggest and most useful tool in the program for SCI game developers is the ability to preview sound resources. And with the built-in set of features it has you can do that in any way possible exactly as the game would output it without having to launch the game itself! The only problem is that you can't really preview PC Speaker and Tandy 3-Voice sound resources very faithfully as the program doesn't utilize the PC Speaker and computers today obviously don't have Tandy 3-voice support anymore. In fact, if you don't have a true FM-Synth sound card then even playing back sound resources in Adlib won't work well either. And MT-32 is only useful if you actually have an MT-32 (or the MUNT emulator, which is coming along nicely I hear!).
But anyway, if nothing else you can check to make sure your properly ammended digital sound effect to a sound resource is working properly (this is done with the programs I have downloadable in the SCI Sound Tools thread).