DiamondWare Digitized

Revision as of 21:34, 8 September 2021

DiamondWare Sound Toolkit^[1] was an SDK for the creation of sound files used in games in the early 1990's by Keith Weiner & Erik Lorenzen^[2]. Sold through MVP Software.

Format Information

DWD (sounds) & DWM (music) are propriety formats for Diamondware's SDK^[3][4]. They seem to be derived from VOC and MIDI^[5].

• DWD files begin with the ascii DiamondWare Digitized
• DWM files begin with the ascii DiamondWare Music

Format Details

DWD Specification^[6]:

       Byte #  Description
       ------  -----------
       00-22   "DiamondWare Digitized\n\0"
       23      1A (EOF to abort printing of file)
       24      Major version number
       25      Minor version number
       26-29   Unique sound ID (checksum XOR timestamp)
       30      Reserved
       31      Compression type (0=none)
       32-33   Sampling rate (in Hz)
       34      Number of channels (1=mono, 2=stereo)
       35      Number of bits per sample (8, 16)
       36-37   Absolute value of largest sample in file
       38-41   length of data section (in bytes)
       42-45   Number of samples (16-bit stereo would be 4 bytes/sample)
       46-49  *Offset of data section from start of file (in bytes)
       50-53   Reserved for future expansion (markers)
       ??-??   Future expansion (heed the 2 offsets, above!)

Software

• Awave Studio

Sample files

• https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/audio/diamondWareDigitized/

References

1. ↑ https://help.adobe.com/archive/en_US/audition/3/audition_3_help.pdf#page=252
2. ↑ https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131602/programming_digitized_sound_on_the_.php
3. ↑ https://archive.org/details/DiamondWaresSoundToolKit_1020
4. ↑ https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102680662
5. ↑ https://github.com/Yagotzirck/quiver_ripper
6. ↑ http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/mxlibs/dwstk.zip