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Bah
Post Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2001 1:16 pm
This is just an annoyance-venting post...

Wonder Boy III. Great game, great music by the great Shinichi Sakamoto. Now I've written an FM-playing plugin and I've got (I think) all the major bugs out of VGMTool 2 which also knows about FM, I can make a set of FM VGMs for it.

However...

Back before the official VGM unveiling, the first proper set of VGMs I (or anyone else) made was Wonder Boy III. While making it, I found that some of the tracks are impossible to get without sound effects played over them - namely, "Vs. Dragon" and "Eternal War". So Bock kindly spent several hours hacking the game, as documented elsewhere on this site, and found that he could make the game play any desired track over the end credits.

So I tried this for the FM VGMs. Since Meka unfortunately has broken FM VGM logging, I had to use Dega and modify the rom by hand each time instead of using meka.pat, but that's no great hassle. What is a hassle is the fact that some of the tracks do not play properly (they have incorrect instruments and percussion). So I had to get all the tracks the usual way, by playing through the game. That still left the two problem tracks I mentioned before, though. Since some of the tracks were less messed up than others, and some seemed to be OK, I decided to log each track twice, once when it's played normally (with SFX over it) and once using the hack.

Then I wrote each one to a WAV file, and combined them so that the "proper" log was played in the left channel and the "hacked" log on the right.

And this is what I got: Eternal War. You might notice a bit of stereoness at the start of the track - that's due to an imperceptible lag between the left and right channels. You will notice the SFX from the ending are only on the left channel. What you will definitely notice is that as the track progresses, the lag between the channels increases. This is because... the hack is playing the music fine, but at a slightly different speed.

Waaaagh!

So it looks like either:

1. I somehow hack the game to play the music at the right speed (it's possible it'll be a value written right next to the track byte, but I'm really bad at hacking roms), or
2. I somehow con Bock into doing it for me :) or
3. I have to release a pre-1.0 set, with little hope of getting the missing tracks working.

This isn't going to delay the FM VGM release since that's already waiting for Meka to be fixed. However, it is annoying >:(

Maxim
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Martin Skog
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There is another way!
Post Posted: Sun Dec 02, 2001 6:55 pm
There is another way! When I was young, I first finished the game with the Hawk, and then with the Pirahna Man. Since the Pirahna Man gets out to the town earlier than the hawk, the sound effects won't come at the same time in the song. That way, I cut the song with my tape recorder to get the song without sound effects. Maybe you can do that if you reprogram vGMtool somehow.
 
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Clever...
Post Posted: Sun Dec 02, 2001 8:54 pm
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> There is another way! When I was young, I first finished the game with the Hawk, and then with the Pirahna Man. Since the Pirahna Man gets out to the town earlier than the hawk, the sound effects won't come at the same time in the song. That way, I cut the song with my tape recorder to get the song without sound effects. Maybe you can do that if you reprogram vGMtool somehow.

Or finish as Wonder Boy (using the WE5T ONE cheat) and you get no "forms being lost" sequence at all. I might give it a go... I'll try rom hacking first, though.

Maxim
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