Hi there! The easiest way I know to “mute” a piece of music in the Dreamcast version, is to simply get rid of it!
There are different ways to achieve this, but for the sake of a shorter post, I’ll only mention my preferred method.
You need two softwares:
- GDI Builder v1.2 by sappharad, at the bottom of the page in “Previous release(s)”. This will build your new gdi image with the music stripped out. I’d recommend you ignore v.1.3 as it doesn’t work on my PC. 1.2 however works great.
- GD-ROM Explorer by Japanese_cake. This will let you explore and extract files from a Dreamcast image file. You can also download this on sappharad’s page, under the name “Unofficial GD-ROM Explorer”.
(scroll the page to find a link to GD-ROM Explorer)
- You also need a gdi image of Shenmue. You can also achieve this with a cdi image, but that would require a different approach. I hope I'm not causing you any trouble.
Assuming you have a gdi image and you've downloaded the two tools, you can go ahead and follow these instructions:
1. Open “GD-ROM Explorer”, then “File”, “Open”, navigate to your “Shenmue Undub” folder, select your DISC 3 gdi image file you want to extract files from;
2. Right-click “DREAMCAST”, then “Extract content to” and select a new folder (call it “Disc 3” to remember where the files came from) where all the extracted files will be put, then press “Ok”;
3. Right-click “IP.BIN”, then “Extract Initial Program as a file to” and select the same folder you created for the extracted files, then press “Save”;
4. You can now close GD-ROM Explorer. Now open your extracted file folder;
5. Go to “Scene”, “03”, then “SOUND”;
6. From here, find and remove “RIM008” (the internal name for Earth and Sea). That’s it, now the game won’t play any music in the 70 Man Battle.
7. Open “GDIbuilder”. In “Data files”, click “Browse” and pick the folder where your extracted files are located; in “IP.BIN”, select the file “IP.BIN” located in the extracted files folder;
8. In “CDDA”, click “Browse”, then go to your original Shenmue folder, then select “Track 4” first, then “Track 5” (they’re the CD audio tracks)*;
* Track 4 must come first, Track 5 later. If you do the opposite, the game may not boot.
9. Before talking about “Output dir”, create a new folder called “output”, then go to your original Shenmue folder, copy all files (the gdi image file and all tracks) and paste them in “output”. In addition, make sure to rename the gdi image to “disc” (the name should now be “disc.gdi”). This is important because GDIbuilder will only update that file automatically if it’s called “disc”. If you don’t do this, the Dreamcast will refuse to boot the game.
10. Now, back to GDIbuilder, in “Output dir”, select that “output” folder I made you create, then finally click “Create GD-ROM”;
11. GDIbuilder will ask you if you’d like to overwrite “track03.bin” and “track06.bin”. Agree by pressing “Yes” and the program will create new custom track03 and track06. Finally, press “Create GD-ROM”, and click “Yes” to overwrite Track03 and Track06 with new custom files.
12. By creating these new track.bin files into a folder that contains the original files, GDI builder will update all track info automatically. That’s a godsend because that’s what makes the game get past the booting screen. Applying this track data manually would be a nightmare!
13. Enjoy playing the 70 Man Battle without listening to the same piece of music over and over again.
Hopefully it should help you out. Let me know how it goes.
EDIT: As for the second question, I can't help you as I've never looked into it. Sorry about that.
