pokemon - explorers of sky (2sf) by dada78641 at 11:51 AM EDT on September 21, 2014
I was just wondering if anyone is working on this game? although I've never done 2sf ripping I do have some asm experience so I'm thinking of picking it up to try and rip this game. but maybe someone else is already doing it? (in any case, I could not find the rip in any of the databases.)
by Kurausukun at 12:46 PM EDT on September 21, 2014
There are no 2sf rips of Explorers of Sky (or Time or Darkness) because the game uses a different format than the standard SSEQ. We don't know how it works currently, and as such, the game is, as of now, unrippable in any format.
Ah, thanks for the heads up, too bad. On the plus side, since it's got a built in music player, at least a flac rip is possible.
by Kurausukun at 6:08 PM EDT on September 21, 2014
You say "flac," but that's only via line-out, which is lossy in the first place. We really are kinda screwed in terms of a super-HQ release of these games, which sucks because they have an excellent soundtrack. :(
by dada78641 at 12:02 AM EDT on September 22, 2014
well, I was thinking of using DeSmuME. I'm no audiophile but its sound quality seemed pretty accurate to me. unfortunately my build has (SEEMS to have?) timing issues, but I assumed I might be able to fix that by actually sitting down and looking at what's wrong.
by dada78641 at 11:46 AM EDT on September 22, 2014
I've given it a try. Using DeSmuME 0.9.9, and through first recording a movie file (probably not necessary though) I was able to record a small test sampler (flac). what's your opinion? it sounds very good to me.
going to record the rest of the tracks later when I have some more time.
I'm recording right now. basically I just make a video file of the jukebox, then cut that video up at precisely the frame on which the music switches to the next song. I can tell the right frame because the song title is displayed. that way I get the exact lengths.
gonna take a while but I'll update when I've got more.
by Kurausukun at 3:50 PM EDT on September 25, 2014
Kudos to your efforts. Hopefully one day someone will be able to analyse and decode this game's wonky format. BTW, may I ask how you ended up recording these/are sure the timing is correct?
by dada78641 at 11:27 PM EDT on September 25, 2014
Recorded an entire playthrough of the Sky Jukebox using DeSmuME 0.9.9 (using its internal avi output function which is nog lag susceptible, and with proper audio output settings). Then I edited the video in VirtualDub and cut out the sound at precisely the frame on which the next song starts, which is indicated by the next title appearing in the UI. I made sure to cut at precisely the first frame of the new song's title (and I've confirmed that the audio starts on that same frame, not just before or after). So every song should be perfectly timed.
It might contain some mistakes, since this is my first 2sf rip.
The archive does not contain 2sflib file, since I do not understand how to optimize a 2sf set yet. You can generate it by executing a batch file in the src directory. All you need to do is putting the unaltered ROM into the directory.
How can I optimize it? Is there a tool like 2sfopt?
@loveemu: not really, all tools we used for 2sf rips so far were written for handling Nitro driver datafiles.
It's great that someone finally tackled the Procyon Studio driver - does your rip work with other games using this driver? Soma Bringer, later Layton games, etc? Would be lovely to have them for portable music history...
@loveemu: my notes are not complete, but here's the short list of games using this driver:
Soma Bringer Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box Professor Layton and the Unwound Future Professor Layton and the Last Specter Luminous Arc Luminous Arc 2 Luminous Arc 3 13 Sai no Hello Work DS Inazuma Eleven Inazuma Eleven 2 Inazuma Eleven 3 Fuurai no Shiren DS 2 - Sabaku no Majou Fuurai no Shiren 4 - Kami no Hitomi to Akuma no Heso Fuurai no Shiren 5 - Fortun Tower to Unmei no Dice Gakken - Chuugokugo Zanmai DS World Destruction - Michibikareshi Ishi
But I never really bothered to see how accurate that was. I'm just thinking it would be nice to be able to find a way sometime to play the music without going through an emulator, kinda like what I did with the Nitro format.
Edit: I looked some of them but they are somewhat different each other and I think it is not easy to reuse the same driver for those games, despite they are programmed by the same person, Hidenori Suzuki. The song file formats look similar, though.
@CyberBotX Thank you very much. Actually I was searching for it since I got a request. 2SF creation was just a side-effect.
Optimizing this set will likely require a full ROM coverage accounting version of vio2sf, or at least additions to vio2sf that can perform ROM coverage checking.
My proposal, which I'll likely implement soonish, would account for all ROM reads in increments of 32 bits, and would be given a 2sflib and a complete list of mini2sfs, and would execute each of them in turn, stopping every 5 seconds to count how many words of ROM have been touched, and stopping the probe when no further ROM is touched for at least 30 seconds. It would then combine the coverage masks for each of the mini2sfs into a single mask, and zero out all parts of the ROM that lie unused.
@Kurausukun Not really, it really depends on my interests and motivations. Do not count on it too much, please.
@kode54 I was thinking of making 2sfopt based on your vio2sf (like I did to my gsfopt). I would be very happy if you made such a tool. I am not very familiar with NDS ROM/RAM structures.
Basically, included is an .IPS patch which turns the ROM into a simple music player, and then the rom2sf tool is used to turn this ROM image into a .2sflib. The included .mini2sf files simply patch in the song number.
Included with the sets are an IPS patcher for Windows console, and a binary of the rom2sf utility. If you are not running Windows, I suggest compiling Neill Corlett's uips for use as a patcher instead, and acquiring the source to rom2sf from its Github repository here. UIPS may be found mirrored on this SVN repository.
I have added an attempt at ROM coverage tracking to vio2sf on my Bitbucket repository, but it somehow misses some data, as it does not track everything needed to make a game run.
Currently, mandatory data added into the tracker is the 512 byte ROM header region, and then the ARM7 and ARM9 copy blocks. Somehow, it doesn't track much other than those, even though I placed trackers in MMU_read(8|16|32) any time the ROM is accessed.
I'm running Windows. The problem isn't that I don't know what to do, it's that rom2sf doesn't work on my computer. It gives me error 0xc000007b when I run it. This happens with a bunch of other programs, and I can't fix it no matter what I do. Also I can't compile ANYTHING because Visual Studio is one of the programs that I can't run on my computer because of the 0xc000007b error. Can someone just please upload their Explorers of Sky .2sflib? It really shouldn't be that much trouble.
I cross compiled it with MinGW instead of using a recent version of MSVC. It is also likely that the MSVC build required up to date MSVC dynamic runtime for whichever version of MSVC was used to build it.
EDIT: Fixed the coverage counting, I had not noticed the game card data in register. Props to setting mprotect PROT_NONE on the ROM after executing most of the loader code.
Thanks a lot. These sound excellent, by the way. There's like one or two instruments that aren't quite right, but all of the important tracks sound perfect.
The instruments that don't sound right are either emulation glitches, or glitches in the original game. The only one that stands out to me is the music box instrument, which has one or more extra samples to its loop. It was like that before I trimmed the set.
The one that stuck out to me was the background percussion in the guild theme (0007). It sounds extra low-quality, like maybe it's at a way lower samplerate than it should be or something.
Set interpolation to None or Blep Synthesis, which will make it sound like the original hardware. I'm just guessing that they intentionally made noisy samples low sample rate so the lack of interpolation would compensate.
Ah, thanks. I don't see an option under my 2sf decoder to set interpolation to "none," though... the topmost option is "zero-order hold." I have no idea what that means (or blep synthesis for that matter). Is it the same as no interpolation?
Zero Order Hold: Hold the same sample until the next sample's time to play. No interpolation, no anti-aliasing. Blep synthesis: Use band-limited steps with fine precision. No interpolation, with anti-aliasing of the sample transitions.
Linear interpolation: Obvious, linear blend between each input sample.
Blam synthesis: Linear interpolation, with anti-aliasing of any samples which exceed the output sample rate.
Cubic interpolation: Fairly self explanatory.
Sinc interpolation: So is this. Windowed sinc sampling of the input samples, tends to muffle rather low quality samples.
Worry not, I've spent some time in tagging both soundtracks. You can find them here.
I also got rid of some soundfiles that aren't music at all, such as sound effects and ambient sounds. And since I'm fairly new to soundtrack ripping in general I couln't optimize the .2sflib file.
So just in case anyone wants to know which filenumbers got removed I've made a little list:
Time only: 0064 (duplicate of 0001) Sky only: 0179-0193 Both games: 0100-0107, 0110-0120, 0125-0128.
All songs are arranged in the PMD Sky Jukebox order. I hope you enjoy the tagged soundtrack :)
I already posted optimized 2sflib files to this topic, and I had a partially tagged or at least named set, which I tagged for the most part, and started timing.
I'll defer it to your set for further timing. It will require listening to each track and manually timing, unlike the usual procedure of converting to MIDI and timing those.
E: Although technically, someone did make a converter, so it should be possible to generate two loops plus fade for looping files, and time the MIDI files.
I mainly did this in my own interests, I hate it to see "game-id-tracknumber.mini2sf" in my music player as I don't know what tracknumber is which song.
Of course, I can understand that you want to do it by yourself (and I also think you can do it better than me) but I thought it was a good idea to share my tagged version here for those, who also want a tagged and arranged version of this soundtrack, so they don't have to struggle around in searching the right song or even doing the tagging procedure (it can be painfull) and I thought that someone will be thankful for that.
I was kinda confused with the 2sflib file. I thought it was something like the gsflib files in GBA games where you run optgsf to trim the gsflib file. And since I have removed some files I thought it needed further triming but it seems that it does not need to. Like I said: I am still fairly new to all this VGM ripping and dumping stuff so mistakes happen. No one is born a master.
No, I don't want to do it by myself. I just said it because I would like for the efforts of the people who sent me the files to be merged, if at all possible.