I Made the Tools I Always Wanted for Shaolin Monks

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Uh, yo, what's going on guys? I'm back with another video. Um, I just want to kind of show y'all something I've been working on a little bit for Shaolin Monks. Uh, nothing crazy. I mean, it's kind of cool, but I just want to show you guys uh, just what I've been working on. I mean, just a little bit, you know. So, we have a I have this file explorer that I've kind of created. So, if you extract Shaolin Monks, the the game, and you go into all these different containers that has like wad files and all this other stuff into the Shaolin Monks in the ISO, right? The ISO rip that you get from the game. So, you can drag and drop it into my tool, and what it's going to do is it's going to open it as best as it can, and what it's going to do is it's going to kind of tell you each and everything that's in that thing. It doesn't work for all of them. It's currently only working for the wad, but you can get the sounds from the other ones. I have another tool to do that as well, but as you can see, it's got all these sf.dat containers that are in here. I'm not exactly sure. A lot of bin files, all these other p2n file I've never I don't know what it like almost any of this is, uh, besides the research that I've been doing with like I mean, it says there's some mesh data in here, which would be models, uh, texture data, which is, you know, textures of the game. You got your sound bank files, which are sounds of the game, um, you know, whatever else that could be in there. Uh, you like said more mesh data, and then this is just straight up data from the bin folders like that is straight up in here. Uh, there's a there's a lot, by the way. There's like literally so much in here. The game is like just so compressed. It's insane.

[00:01:46]Uh, but there's so many textures, so much mesh data, that like it's insane.

[00:01:50]There's there's there's a lot of stuff in here, right? Um, I don't I've tried to do certain things about it and it's kind of it's kind of worked to some degree.

[00:02:01]Um like I've had pictures that come out.

[00:02:04]So, I'm going to show you.

[00:02:06]You're going to think I'm kind of dumb.

[00:02:08]Um but I'm not and I'm just going to show you. So, this picture right here you probably wouldn't be able to tell me what that is, right? But that same picture is this same Oh my goodness. My bad.

[00:02:21]That same picture Oh, come on.

[00:02:25]That same picture is this picture right here.

[00:02:28]Now, you may not be able to tell but I'm going to show you side by side. It is the same picture. It is the same picture. I don't really know how to convert it from that same file into the original. I mean, obviously I have this because I dumped it from PCSX2 but we're trying to dump these manually from the game files themselves. So, you have over here on the left-hand side, you've got the you know the same thing here the you know, in the background where the versus stages and all that stuff. You've got the the Yin Yang symbol. Sorry, I don't know why I can't talk. You got the Yin Yang symbol on the floor. It's obviously on the floor. You've got the middle split.

[00:03:07]So, this is the scene transition texture that they have whenever you press uh you know, single player co-op or whatever and uh then you got the dragon statue right here. And so, then you got the temple in the background and everything.

[00:03:20]And and it's clear as day. I mean, you if you look hard enough, you know, you can see it. I mean, obviously I I kind of gave you proof of that. So, I've been kind of working on it quite a bit.

[00:03:31]Um I do have Trying to remember which one it is. I think it's this one. So, Yeah, yeah. So, this is some this is Shaolin Monks. And what we can do here is I can go back. Um I'm going to go here.

[00:03:48]And I'm going to drop in a wad file just cuz why not, right? And I drop it in and you can see all of these different ADX sounds that are in the game. Every single one of them.

[00:04:01]>> [cough and clears throat] >> You can hear them, sorry. So, you could hear that. Obviously. So, you can hear and you can play all of them and if you want to, you can download them in ADX format, which is the original format. And it'll pull it straight from the game. Uh or straight from the file. Or you can download it in wave if you want to hear it in better quality or whatever. You could totally do that, too. Um it's nothing crazy.

[00:04:26]It's nothing like blown out of the water or, you know, anything like that. I mean, it's just the ability to that there's 49 containers, you know, there's 751 tracks, the run time, and then, you know, whatever else you want to do with that. I mean, there's countless stuff in here. The get up sounds, long, spawn, uh slipping, react, struggles, portals, like there's so many sounds in here and AND THEY WERE >> [groaning] >> THEY'RE THEY'RE REALLY LOUD, SORRY.

[00:04:55]THEY'RE REALLY LOUD, BUT they're they're in here. Like, they got Liu Kang, you know, everyone and you can do it for the other files, too. Just refresh this, basically. And then you'll grab your other sound, boom. Drag and drop it in there.

[00:05:08]And so, like, you'll see ambient music, ambient, uh uh intro, medium, intense, intense ending, wind gust, soul tomb, ambient sound effects, like There's There's a lot in here that you can use and take from the game. I mean, sorry, I say take from the game, but not, you know, really You know, you know what I mean. So, uh yeah. And so, this is just a This is just a step in development to be able to modifying the game uh permanently. I mean, we've already done it in the past.

[00:05:39]We've already been able to give you guys the ability to change the sounds in game. It's already been possible. We've already done it before. You can do that via hex editing and making sure the sound bites kind of like don't You can only replace the sound as much as never go over that unless you know how to manipulate the memory, you know, and make sure that you're not overriding something that you shouldn't. At the end of the day, it's it's really tough to be able to mod game. Obviously, taking steps forward to be able to make sure that people can mod the game in ways where it's a lot easier and it's not that hard. But, I mean, as far as this this is I made this as a simple and easy as possible for anybody to do. Just extract the ISO, drag and drop the wad file, or whatever it is.

[00:06:30]And you can extract all the sounds. You can extract more data. And And on top of that, I think I even made Let me see if I can't find it.

[00:06:41]ADX player.

[00:06:44]I think it's this one.

[00:06:47]I could be wrong.

[00:06:50]Yeah, so I even made a ADX player as well if you want. So, what you can do is you can add the file here.

[00:06:58]Um and you can play the ADX sounds. So, this is Lou.

[00:07:06]Wait.

[00:07:08]Wait.

[00:07:09]You can't hear it. Sorry. Let me Let me fix that for y'all.

[00:07:15]Add app.

[00:07:18]Hopefully this works.

[00:07:20]It might be really loud, by the way.

[00:07:23]Okay, for some reason it's just not working. Anyway, the point is it it'll work on your end. I don't know why it's not working right now. I'm not going to get into it. But, the point is is that you can play all your ADX sounds that you you'll extract the ADX sounds.

[00:07:38]You'll use my other tool to listen to the ADX sounds if you want to. Um, you know, just so you can listen to them in ADX, if you want. Um, because you can't open the ADX in like almost anything else, unless you go on GameBanana and you find those really old ADX tools or whatever. But, um, but for the most part, being able to extract them, listen to them, uh, and stuff like that, you can you can totally do that with my tools that I'm going to release to you guys, probably whenever you see this video go up, they'll be already out. Um, I'm trying to think that putting sounds back into the game and having them also be looped, there are other tools for that. I I haven't created those.

[00:08:20]Uh, I don't know if I will create those or not. Probably I would say probably not, because there is a tool, I'll have to ask my friend Z, uh, he knows, uh, he he had a tool that he used that was really good. It was a really good tool that it had a loop. You could loop it at certain times, and so whenever it would play to that certain thing, it would loop back after the song, and it could loop during certain parts. It's, uh, it's pretty amazing. It's really cool.

[00:08:46]Uh, but that's for that's for the whole 'nother thing. I mean, it works great, but at the moment, like I said, you can drag and drop these. It's it's insane, you know, ambient sounds. I mean, the Soul Tombs voiceover is Baraka. Like like there's so much in here and for the game. And you also got to remember that this that this game had uh, the dialogue of uh, different regions, right? So, like, you know, you had uh, different countries and uh, languages that were like they had the the the France version, they had the uh, the English version.

[00:09:25]They they had so many versions for Shala-Monka. It was actually kind of crazy that they were able to do all those, um, back in the day. So, there's a lot there's a lot to it, and you know, you can go in and if you guys want, you'll can make a whole page to kind of like decompile everything, if y'all want, and and make an entire folder and everything to This is this, this is this, you know, whatever. Y'all Y'all Y'all can do anything with this. I really don't care. It's totally up to you guys. I'm just making it widely available to you guys.

[00:09:57]So, uh but with a wad explorer, this one's even more crazy. This one's even more crazy because like it's just got so much to it. But, one sec.

[00:10:08]But, uh yeah, no, it's it's really crazy, like I said, to be able to see uh a lot of this stuff. The And some of these folders uh I think there was what No, there was a file. I can't see if I can find it in Shell monks.

[00:10:23]It was Let me see if I can search a file name. Let me put in Scorpion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's not actually scorpion. It's just corp corpian for some reason. And what I did was I downloaded it, right?

[00:10:38]And I used one of my tool my other tools.

[00:10:43]Let me see if I can't remember.

[00:10:46]Uh is it the ADX player? Wait, no, no, because I downloaded it.

[00:10:51]It's in SF It's in sf.dat.

[00:10:54]So, let me I don't know if I need this one or not.

[00:11:00]Let me check.

[00:11:02]See if this one I don't think I don't think it was this. Yeah, I didn't think it was this, either.

[00:11:07]Um Sorry, guys. Like, I did a whole bunch of stuff, like And this was before I left. So, like, it was it was quite a bit. So, give me a second here while I figure this out.

[00:11:21]Okay, so I did end up finding it. So, I made something called an SPU tool. So, what this does is it takes the audio that you would see from the one that I just took, which was a dot Scorpions.dat.

[00:11:38]It says dot dat file.

[00:11:40]And what I can do here is I can open dot dat or dot spu files.

[00:11:46]And I can import it and boom.

[00:11:48]So now I have runts, pains, hits, impacts. You don't usually find these sounds because they're so compressed. They're so tiny. I mean, look at these.

[00:12:00]These are bite-sized files, dude. Like uh and and it kind of sucks because they're like they're super tiny and it's hard because you're talking about compression layer of decryption uh and encryption as well. So like you got all of these So let me let me just show you visually cuz it's like really hard to explain. So if we go back here, right? Like Shaolin Monks is all of these or sorry, it's really like all of these. So like all of these plus some other stuff that going to click on the font classic and other stuff. Um all of these compressed into like an ISO image, right? And then you decompress that, you got your wad, wa, waf, wag, weh, and you know, the rest, right? Like And so all of those have different storages within those you know, in those containers.

[00:12:49]Um like p2n um your dot dat, t t something. There's like tga or something. I can't remember what it was. But there's a whole bunch of different file structures in there, right? And so you can you you look at all that and you're just like blows your mind, right?

[00:13:05]And so you you kind of have to just go through and slowly decrypt each and every one of those formats and then continuously do that for the rest of them. And once you have them all decrypted, right?

[00:13:17]You can you can use them. And you can re Not I wouldn't say re-encrypt, but but like you you're the you I don't know how I'm going to be able to put them back together. That's That's the thing that's probably going to be hard the most. Um but it's a lot when I when I when I left, dude, it was just it was nuts. So, just trying to be be able to do all this. And so, like I said, multiple containers and they streamline. And so, the game actually streams the data uh and pulls the data where it's needed, when it's needed from uh each of those containers when it's being used for, you know, audio sounds and whatever, you know what I mean? And so, but the majority of the stuff that's really really jam-packed in there is apparently in the wad, which is the main directory from a lot of the stuff that I was looking at. Uh there there probably is so much more in the other others as well, too. I just I haven't been able to I just, like I said, I just got back not too long ago from uh vacation and everything. So, I haven't been able to get the uh the other files uh formats besides the the wad file to uh decrypt any of that yet. So, I don't know what's in the the other ones besides like other sounds as well that are streamed from those files whenever you're playing the game as well. Um But But yeah, man, I've been doing I've been doing quite a bit and I just kind of wanted to share like share all that with you guys, you know, cuz it's been uh it's been a little bit since I think anybody's really done some, you know, kind of deep diving on some Shaolin Monk stuff like this. And I don't know, man. Uh I think I think it's really interesting. It's really cool to see. Uh let me know what you guys think, you know, in the comments down below. Like, comment, subscribe, of course, guys, you know, if you want to see uh more stuff like this. This is just like a genuine video. This isn't anything crazy. This is just like my passion and my love for the game and trying to uh learn more about it. Uh learn more how they made it, learn more why it's made the way they made it it was it's like the most different game of all time from all of the other it is unique to every other Mortal Kombat game and I think it's amazing and I love it and you just you love to see it and so I just want to see what I can do push myself to you know find more out about the game besides the UMK SM ultimate and like the remaster and everything like those those are great those are cool but I've always had passion into deep dive and digging and really figuring out how Shaolin Monks was really stuck together in that short amount of time uh without I mean the talent the talent that these people had to put out a product that yes it was unfinished but it worked you know what I mean like it freaking worked and you could just tell that the characters from the from the characters to the gameplay to you know the stages so much about the game was unfinished in countless ways and uh you know you have so many reused animations from the versus characters to the story characters uh to the to the boss characters the versus characters a lot of them use the same uh the same moves or reuse moves in in a full animation rather than a smaller looped animation or skipping frames within an animation to make it look like a brand new animation even though it's not it's just a skipped frame uh ported from another animation to make it look different and there's so much that we've learned about this game since you know forever and you know I feel like the more and more we learn about it and the more and more you know it's crazy to me how they put this game together in such a a small window and even the Xbox version the Xbox version is basically garbage compared to PS2. Like the Xbox version is even more unfinished. Survival mode doesn't work.

[00:17:28]I mean you get like what? I think the past the first two levels or something.

[00:17:31]It's not finished. It's not even finished. You can't even get to level nine or whatever. And uh there's just so much about it that's like I said interesting to me, you know.

[00:17:44]But for the most part I just wanted to share this with you guys, you know, it's my passion for the game. I love the game. I love Mortal Kombat. It's it's been in my life for as long as I can remember as a kid.

[00:17:56]Uh just you know, showing my kids the game, you know, I'm I'm not very old, you know, I'm only 23, but like I grew up with, you know, brothers and sisters that were you know, a lot older than me. Man, the age gap is like 10 10 plus years maybe just a little like a little bit to plus 10 like maybe 12 or whatever, but it it it's the fact that I grew up with them that played all of these older games and I grew up on that same thing. So like but with Shaolin Monks, man, it's one of those games that I played and it stuck out for me and it was very different and yeah, but I could sit here forever and I could tell you guys all about that.

[00:18:40]Y'all don't want to hear it. So I I just wanted to share my findings, my you know, everything I got here. Like I said, I'm going to I'm going to package all of this kind of these tools up for you guys and I mean you saw me use it.

[00:18:56]So it's pretty simple. It's understandable. You click here, you click there, it works. And so it's pretty straightforward. So thank you guys. I really appreciate it.

[00:19:07]I mean this is just a this is just a video for you guys to really see what I've been putting in, you know, and that's kind of it, just in the background, but you know, love you guys and I appreciate it, so.