The Punisher Arcade VGZ Midi/SF2 rip? by Arcanuman1 at 2:30 PM EST on January 25, 2020
This is another one that's been driving me up the wall.
In making my Yoko Shimomura tribute soundfont remixes, I found that she did the OST for the Punisher 90's arcade game, & upon listening found the music quite good. However I couldn't figure out any way to rip the midis from the game. The music is saved in a .vgz format & is obviously midi, but any time i try to use a converter for it (all of which are made for MegaDrive/Genesis tracks) it doesn't work & I just get an empty midi devoid of notes.
Since this is a very old game & it's doubtful there's any sampled instruments/drums in it, the SF2 side isn't quite as vital, but the MIDIs are 100% what I need. Any assistance would be GREATLY appreciated.
It could be because it's VGZ (gzip'd VGM), you may need to extract the VGZs first before converters work, but that's just a guess.
Also being that Mega Drive music uses FM synthesis, extracting instrument samples and building a soundfont wouldn't be immediately possible. You would have to use channel muting and do the sampling (and looping) manually - painstaking work even if done in a rudimentary way without multisamples.
You can't do much with vgm/vgz since it only logs sound commands. The game uses qsound iirc, get the arcade roms and drop them zipped into vgmtrans... assuming the perimeters for the game in vgmtrans mame_roms.xml file isn't fucked up like alot of other qsound games, or even supported since it's also technically a CPS1 game rather than CPS2.
Tried those methods. Some of them required purchase, which I'm not in the position to d currently, & the others just didn't work.
Basically, what I really need t o know is: is there any way to get the font & 'midi' from an arcade game? I'd really like to do the same thing to the arcade version of Tekken 2 as well.
I told you what you needed to do, but obviously something didn't work on your end, so I'll try to be clearer in my instructions. Get your hands on a MAME romset, preferably the parent romset (Should be around 3MB) for The Punisher because that's going to have the QSound data that your going to need. Boot up vgmtrans, then drag the mame romset still zipped into vgmtrans. If you did these correctly and had the correct romset, vgmtrans will recognize the zip file and give you a huge list of files which include instrument tables and sequences which you can then convert to either SF2 or DLS for the instruments and Midi for the sequences. Keep in mind the Midi conversion is not perfect because the player goes out of it's way to avoid assigning any channels to channel 10, often force-ably merging 2 channels creating undesirable effects.
As for Tekken 2, I'm unaware of any midi converter for Namco C352 base games. The best person to ask would be the Quattro Play maker SuperCTR since he spent time reverse engineering the driver used in those games.
by Arcanuman1 at 12:08 PM EST on February 23, 2020
That did it! Thanks a lot for your patience & the slightly simplified reply. Worked like a charm.
If I'm understanding this method correctly, I can use it on a lot of ROMs as long as I include the parent in the ZIP. Basically the same as you have to for BridgeM1. Lots of possibilities.
You forgot my previous post. It should support all or nearly all cps2 qsound based games, but perimeters in the mame xml file included are not correct for some games making them not load up at all. The zip thing is just for the CPS2 mame files, it doesn't support any other arcade games at the moment except for a few rare cases. You should consult the vgmtrans readme or check the github to see exactly what it supports.
by JacintaB19 at 12:09 AM EST on December 30, 2020
Does this SF2 and MIDI ripping thing work on Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix as well. I'd want to rip these two games in the same way.