USF is for rips by ToonPal at 12:36 PM EST on February 28, 2006
The USF format is handy for ripping music from N64 games and making them fully playable on a computer without having to resort to recording the tunes to WAV or MP3 files or re-writing the software for playing back the game's music on native, non-N64 hardware.
But what about when software DOES exist to play certain music data formats stored in N64 programs on desktop computers? A couple of Dynamix intro sound rips were posted in USF format a number of months ago. But I think it can hardly be considered a "rip". The reason I say this is that the music data in the ROMs are in MOD format, a format highly supported on the PC! Why I should have to emulate the N64 to enjoy a couple of MODs is beyond me. I'm no programmer, but after grabbing my own copy of the Dynamix intro ROM images and beating on them with EDIT.COM, I had truly "ripped" three tunes that I was able to play with a PC MOD music player! They sounded a whole lot better, too, and took a lot less memory to play than the click-filled, memory-hogging N64 player. Heck, I was even able to find these particular tunes up for download from various Internet sites when I "Googled" the song titles I found in the ROM images.
Anyway, I guess it just cracks me up. I can't program myself out of a paper bag, but here I've gone and made three "N64 tunes" available for playback on the PC without having to do any fancy programmer! Ha ha ha! [sigh]
I need a salad.
by unknownfile at 12:58 PM EST on February 28, 2006
Don't mind UF. He has been trying to run off new members lately.
by PokeParadox at 2:00 PM EST on February 28, 2006
I can relate to UF response personally. ToonPal is basically belittling UF. I did point out that the Dynamix intros were just modplayers... but it turns out that he already knew this and replied so.
I assumed after this repsonse that the reason that he bothered ripping the Dynamix intro music(s) was simply to practise ripping usfs. UF was also so kind as to point me into the right direction to download the MOD files.
When learning a programming language, you often have to do redundant examples, just to learn a concept. I cannot find a similar process in the context of ripping N64 music inconceivable.
The trick is that most games don't use MOD, they use a MIDI variant but with enough specific customizations for each game that it's really hard to handle. Destop wrote a winamp plugin that plays the sequences directly, but it didn't often work and worked poorly when it did. USF is a universal solution. (or it's supposed to be)
Indeed. For those games that don't use a commonly supported format on the PC, the PSF(USF) format is a godsend.
Well, after reading Mr. Paradox's post, I've been sitting here for thirty minutes now trying to think of some way there wasn't something wrong with my initial post, but now I don't like it, either. You got me. I think I got too excited when I found what I figured to be the better alternative to the N64 plugin for enjoying the tunes from the demo. And when I eagerly went to post my success, I ended up bashing the USF author, not even knowing who it was. Sorry about that.
Anyway, I also wanted to mention that I had some fun with a game called Top Gear Overdrive and EDIT.COM. I ripped all the MP3s out of it, and now I can listen to the rock soundtrack with plain-vanilla Winamp. They're only 22kHz 24kbps streams, but I suppose that's to be expected when dealing with the crunch of a 12-megabyte(96-megabit) ROM. I wanted to ask hcs if he thought it advantageous to have playable non-USF N64 music dumps available for download on his site, even though it seems to be exclusive to USF. I'm not so sure about this particular dump, though, seeing as how there's a USF set posted for that game already. I don't want to inadvertently upset anyone else.
That's interesting, I was unaware the TGO's music was actually MP3. I don't think that'll be hosted here, though. Not enough space, and it's something of a departure from my mission.
For the record, Top Gear Rally also uses modules. The composer Barry Leitch has them up on his site, so you might wanna avoid putting any time into that in future. Thought that might be somewhat relevent here.
I got interested in the Top Gear Rally thing, so I went ahead and looked up Barry Leitch's website. I'm assuming it's http://www.barryleitch.com. Unfortunately, to my discontent, I couldn't find a trace of any MODs available for download. All I could find was a demo reel MP3. The Update section had several mentions of XMs added at different times; no mention of anything removed, but I still couldn't find any downloadable files.