Between 1997 and 1998, Namco released 18 arcade game soundtracks on the Wonder Spirits record label. Among those are 5 soundtracks that include a special data track on then, allowing them to be inserted into a PC or Mac of the era and you would be treated to videos, images, a CDDA music player, and (by 1997 standards) high-resolution booklet artwork. For many years these were almost never distributed with the music on the disc, and to my knowledge, there was no central repository for this seminal Namco work. It’s clear some people spent a ton of time on these Macromedia Director presentations, and they deserve to be celebrated. This will be done in 4 parts:
- Videos: A YouTube playlist of all of the original video files found on the discs. These will generally be poor quality, washed out, highly compressed .mov files, but this more or less in line with what was available from multimedia of the day (especially when the same CD also must fit 350-ish megabytes of uncompressed audio.
- 765Style: These are what I’ve been posting on this site, and on Twitter. This is the process of me mounting the CD, pulling off the data track files, taking the protected Macromedia Director files off the disc, removing that protection, and then exporting all images used. In rare cases, I use a slightly different frame export process in cases where the intended viewing of something is a composite of a number of images.
- Raw Data Track Files: This link will appear as a directory view, it would simulate you putting the disc into your PC and clicking on the drive in “My Computer”, the files will appear at the do on the disc, including .ini files, readme files, the covert artwork, and in some cases, even a Quicktime installer. (This can also be downloaded all at once.)
- Raw Binary Files: A straight link to the 1-for-1 bytes version of the data track as it’s burned to the CD, this would also contain Mac files and other files that would be hidden on Windows partitions.
