This HOWTO explores methods for changing the behaviors of "Know Your Name Elmo," a computerized Sesame Street toys. I love projects that tweak or subvert the behaviors of computerized toys. There's so much power and flexibility in the average toy, but it's wildly underutilized in most instances.
There are two directories, "names" contains samples of about 15,000 names. "sounds" contains elmo spoken phrases in audio files. The audio extension is "rbf". I have not been able to determine this file format. I have tried to import it as a raw format using a-Law, u-Law, etc. but no luck. There are strings of zeros in the audio files, so I suspect that if compression is actually used, its some sort of ADPCM variant. Without being able to convert these files from a usable format, we cannot create new files just yet — but keep practicing those Elmo voices, i'm sure its format discovery is just around the corner.
Another file of interest is temp.inf. This contains a sort of scripting file that defines what audio files are played in what order. It also has variables, various groupings to handle games and songs, and a memory map at the bottom of the file.
(via Make Blog)
