Multiple Questions by Uikri at 5:43 AM EST on February 1, 2022
Hi. I'm wondering about several games.
Pikmin 2 GCN Pikmin 1 GCN Luigi's Mansion GCN Pokemon Colosseum/XD GCN Zelda Twilight Princess GCN Metroid Prime Hunters NDS Legacy of Goku 2 GBA
I've been hoping these games would get uploaded for over a decade now, but to no avail. I know the Pikmin/Pokemon games and Luigi's Mansion are streamed, but has any progress been made in reverse engineering the file formats a la Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube?
Admittedly, I've already asked about Twilight Princess in the past, but I'm having great difficulty remembering to try things and making myself try them when I remember (I have mental disabilities I'm not just being an ass. I just don't completely understand what to do and I know that if I hit a roadblock I won't be able to get help very quickly). If anyone would be willing to help that would be greatly appreciated.
As for Prime Hunters, there is an upload, but all the channels are tangled together. It's been over 10 years since [https://www.hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=20996&showpage=0#post_21002]this comment[/url] was posted. Has anyone figured out how to deal with it now?
I have no idea what the deal is with Legacy of Goku II, but surely someone knows something by now?
P.S. There is a song missing from the Demon's Souls upload. Armor Spider's fight music.
I thought we'd ripped Colosseum and XD a long time ago, but maybe not. There's a rip of Pokemon XD dated April 2021 which seems ok.
Maybe it's like the other ones you mentioned in that there are a few streamed tracks but many more sequenced tracks that aren't yet playable? There's not been any general emulated GCN sequence player effort yet, to my knowledge, and if there was specific work on RE'ing those games I haven't heard of it. But I may be a bit out of the loop, if it wasn't mentioned on this forum it might have escaped my notice.
From the sounds of this post, Pikmin (assuming you're talking about the video streams) should be Nintendo AFC 4-bit ADPCM (like the .stx files). I ran the BMS script, but it doesn't output anything, so I'm not sure how finished it is, but at least knowing the codec, it should be enough for someone to make a proper extractor, or add support in h4m_audio_decode.
If I had experience in these sort of things I would work on an program myself but don't..not gonna lie I'd literally pay someone a lump sum just to develop a program similar to VGMTrans but better that can rip the sequences and sounds from all these GC games and more capable of spitting out the midis and soundfonts, that's all I want. Doesn't have to be 100% accurate either, just enough for everything to be editable in a DAW and sample converter is fine with me.
Not interested in any of these so-called "sequence" players that just take the sound data from a game in question and play it within the application with no way of manipulating the music outside of it.
@dj4uk6cjm: maybe smsdumpbanks (from gctools) will do some of what you want? It doesn't convert BMS to MIDI, but it does extract samples and instrument metadata.
Hey, thanks to everyone who responded. I accidentally forgot I made the post but I'm back to respond to everyone now.
@LAC Oh, wow! I've been checking SNESmusic.org/pmh because I thought that was where we were supposed to check now but I'm so happy to see Legacy of Goku II was finally ripped! The music in that game is just so good. Thank you so much for letting me know!
@hcs Oh! Nice to see Gale of Darkness! Last I had checked it wasn't there. I was super tired so I probably forgot to check stuff again. My bad! Although it's odd that XD is there but not Colosseum. Is XD streamed while Colosseum is sequenced? Where else might I inquire as to progress on GCN reverse engineering?
@Nisto Unfortunately, most of Pikmin 1 & 2's music would seem to be sequenced, which I think is the issue. It would be nice if we could get the MIDIs+instruments like with Crystal Chronicles.
@MusicMantis That does look really promising! I wonder if we can help spur progress once more.
@dj4uk6cjm Yes! I would also love the MIDIs and instruments, but I would also like to be able to play them in foobar instead of only being able to use them in a DAW.