Sega Saturn SSF:How to rip sequences that reference to multiple tone banks? by caius at 10:47 AM EST on February 13, 2011
Hi all, I'm starting to rip .SSF file from Sega Saturn ISOS (I have more than 1400 ISOS..), sometimes I do this manually, some times I use the great VGMToolbox. Now I'm stuck because I have found sequences file that use multiple tone banks . How can i solve this problem? I read in ssfmake.py:
"NOTE: The script is really only set up to handle a single bank of tone data (matching the sequence bank). # Some games contain sequences that reference multiple tone banks. To handle these, the script # needs to be run multiple times (each time with a different tone data file and bank #). Each time # script is run, a file named 68000ram.bin will be dumped out. This is a 512K file that corresponds # to sound memory. For additional runs, just set the driver file name to this file ('68000ram.bin') # as well as setting the corresponding bank numbers and tone data files, leaving the other file name # parameters blank. Finally, the last pass of the script needs to have the bank number set to the # desired sequence bank since the script always writes this value into the SEQUENCE_START command."
For example this attached is a minissf which should use two different tone banks, it's clearly stated in sssinfo.py output
Sequence Bank 2 - Track 0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Resolution : 480 steps/quarter-note Tempo Event 0: 0 steps, 500000 microseconds/quater-note Tempo Event 1: 3840 steps, 500000 microseconds/quater-note <---- Loop point ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Channel 0: Bank 2, Voice 1 Channel 1: Bank 5, Voice 0 Channel 2: Bank 2, Voice 2 Channel 3: Bank 2, Voice 6 Channel 4: Bank 2, Voice 4 Channel 5: Bank 2, Voice 0
It plays fine but compared with the one in the arcade test mode of MAME it lacks some instruments because I just ripped it using only one tone bank.
http://rapidshare.com/files/447725938/SSF.rar
First I tried the ssfmake.py script with no luck.Besides area map are only for sequence that reference to a single tone bank, this is another problem.