SPCtag : Java SPC tag reader (SNES Sound Files)

SPCTag is a Java stand-alone command line app for reading the ID666 tags from SNES SPC-files.

SPC-files are sound files containing ripped chiptune music from Super Nintendo and Super Famicom games. They are named after the Sony SPC-700 sound chip created by Ken Kutaragi (who later became the father of the Playstation).

Not for PKCS#7 certificates who share the same filename extension.

🖥️ Usage

usage: spctag <filename>
 -j,--json      output JSON
 -v,--verbose   verbose output
 -V,--version   print version
 -x,--xid6      print xid6 tags

For example:

$ java -jar spctag -v --json "/warez/spc/dkc2/17 Stickerbrush Symphony.spc"

[
  {
    "fileHeader": "SNES-SPC700 Sound File Data v0.30",
    "tagFormat": "Text",
    "artist": "Dave Wise",
    "songTitle": "Stickerbush Symphony",
    "gameTitle": "Donkey Kong Country 2",
    "dumpedBy": "Datschge",
    "comments": "Bramble Maze",
    "dateSpcWasDumped": "",
    "lengthSeconds": 253,
    "fadeLengthMilliseconds": 10000,
    "emulatorUsedToDumpSpc": "Unknown",
    "xid6": {
      "publishersName": "Rare, Nintendo",
      "copyrightYear": "1995",
      "introductionLength": 25.3,
      "fadeLength": 640000
    }
  }
]

Features

• ✔️ 100% Java (Java 17) ☕
• ✔️ Supports UTF-8 encoding in the tags!
• ✔️ Command line. Multi-platform.
• ✔️ Batch processing using wildcards is possible! For example: java -jar spctag *.spc
• ✔️ xid6 support (extended tags).
• ❌ Edit tags (as of yet)

💾 Building

This is a Maven-project.

Linux / POSIX

Run:

./build.sh

Windows

Run:

mvnw.cmd clean install assembly:single

to build the JAR-file.

📁 Binaries

Binaries are included with every release on Github to simplify for end-users who can't compile stuff on their platform.

Character encodings

Supported character encodings are:

• ASCII
• UTF-8
• latin-1

The program auto-detect character encodings, if text is not valid UTF-8 then latin-1 is used. This may result in mojibake.

Noncharacters in UTF-8 are disallowed for security reasons.

• Which code points are noncharacters?

🔧 Development

1. I wrote this because there was a lack of tools supporting the SPC-format.
2. And it would be a fun project to learn binary I/O in Java.
3. Lastly, spctag has the best support for parsing the "Emulator used for dumping SPC"-tag 😁

Most of the existing tools are 15-20 year old legacy Windows programs that won't run on modern computers. The source code is lost. Or it was written in C/C++ for 32-bit architecture and won't compile on modern 64-bit computers.

Java is multi-platform and you can run and compile 20-year-old Java programs without any issues. So I'd figure this would be a suitable platform for posterity.

Hopefully doing it in Java makes it easy to convert to XML and JSON, as well as persisting it in databases using SQL.

🆔 Emulator Dump Tag

The Emulator used for dumping-value is set by 1 byte-flag. In two different offset locations depending on if the SPC-file is using binary or text-format for storing the ID666-tag.

• Binary offset 0xD1
• Text offset: 0xD2

There are two different set of specifications for emulator codes available. The legacy SPC-file specification and the newer Japanese one. SPCTag supports both of them.

🇯🇵 Japanese spec

The following byte-values are used according to the Japanese spec:

Emulator name	Text format	Binary format
Unknown	0x30	0x00
ZSNES	0x31	0x01
Snes9x	0x32	0x02
ZST2SPC	0x33	0x03
Other	0x34	0x04
SNEShout	0x35	0x05
ZSNES / W	0x36	0x06
Snes9xpp	0x37	0x07
SNESGT	0x38	0x08

Note: Other and Unknown are both specified with unique values (?) somehow...

👵 Legacy spec

Only 3 values are defined in the legacy spec (SPC File Format v.0.31 txt-file)

Emulator name	Text format	Binary format
Unknown	0x00	0x00
ZSNES	0x01	0x01
Snes9x	0x02	0x02

🏭 Factory Method

• se.anosh.spctag.emulator.factory contains a factory method.
• Used for creating immutable Emulator-objects based on the two aforementioned tables.

Usage example:

Emulator emulatorUsed = EmulatorFactory.createEmulator(0x31, Type.JAPANESE) // Type.LEGACY is also available

📜:Licence

GPL 3 only. See COPYING

Libraries used & credit

• Apache Commons CLI-library - Apache Licence version 2
• tinylog - Apache Licence version 2
• S-SMP chip for SFC - made by Yaca2671 (2007). Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
• SPC dumped-date check (logs warning if tag pre-dates the birth of the SPC-format; 1998-04-15) used is from SPCTool (GPL2 or later) by Anti Resonance. Source

Dedication

SPCtag is dedicated to my favourite OC remixer Avien (1986-2004). RIP 🎶 🎷