@abe619: What are you talking about in this thread? It has nothing to do with the engine (I guess... but maybe there's something to tag screens as "secret area"). However, if you have the PC version, you can remove this sound quite easily. Just edit sounds.dat (but make sure you change the content, and not the duration).
@Sabre-Toothed Lime, You couldn't understand nothing of AO games file? We have found quite significants things. Maybe you could try one more time
This project IS possible. But the hard part comes: we have found about everything that's a "format", everything else (save file format, "Path" format, and scripting) is likely to be code or "serialization".