Generic Driver Test by hcs at 10:25 PM EDT on May 27, 2005
I've built a generic audio lib driver from the PlaySeq demo, and I'll be trying it with games more likely to work soon, but the first game I tested was Jet Force Gemini. It sounds like they've modified things a bit on their end... but could someone more familiar with the music give their opinion on this?
I then proceeded to rip a sample from Body Harvest, again I ask someone familiar with the music to let me know how good this sounds. It seems to have come out better for me. I'm using the .ctl, .tab, and .seq from Body Harvest, everything else is the devkit example player. What worries me is that there's a lot of configuration, even certain effects, that might not be included. I'll try a few more things before I go through with this set, but here's an example for now.
For the record the JFG came from data Destop had collected... and my initial check of JFG seemed to indicate a very loose usage of the audio library functions. Body Harvest is much less, er, creatively programmed.
I've found that Body Harvest doesn't use any custom parameters for AlSeqpConfig (which would be stuff like functions for effects) but it does use a custom reverb effect for AlSynConfig (previously I was using the "small room" model). I copied that table into PlaySeq and here's what I have:
Thank God... I finally got this last friggin' annoying bug out of the way, there was a click at the beginning of some tracks, now a few frames of silence pass before the sequence player starts and that seems to have fixed things. I'm also nearly done with a .ctl/.tbl ripper, which I used in Body Harvest to isolate things used in bank 1 (instruments for the sequencer, bank 0 was sound effects) which brought the .tbl size down significantly (by more than half). The .ctl processing is apparently missing something so I had to use all of that, but it's 50k total so no big loss. I'm uploading the set now as a prelim.
Once again, please, people familiar with Body Harvest tell me how this sounds.I don't think there's anything else that needs to be done with this set but tagging.
Oh, and, er, bh57.miniusf is in there by mistake. It's just silence.
This driver should pave the way for "easy" ripping for many games.
Heh, since you said easy in quotations, I think the question that follows is "what do you mean by easy?" I mean, ripping MIDIs from games with the smashy driver (and other drivers? O.o) is like a walk in the park using VGMTrans - would the process be anything like that? I never imagined it would be somehow but I thought I'd ask.
Well, it means that if something uses the audio library I can locate the .seq, .ctl and .tbl, any parameters used for the synthesizer, and just plug them into the driver. At least that's the theory...
I'm taking a look at Forsaken now, it's all straight from the official libraries.
I figure it could in fact be automated, add a scanner for library functions into an emulator (HLE emus do that already), trap the parameters to the initialization functions, BAM!
Oh yays, we are on the way to making a craptapper for usf!
Body Harvest by Gema at 7:34 PM EDT on May 29, 2005
Thanks for Body Harvest Hcs!
However i dont think its ready yet for tagging, some tracks have errors, like missing instuments - bh1f is one fine example - you can realy tell that something is wrong without having played the game...
Some other tracks have similar problems but less noticeable... i dont know how you can be sure when a track is good if you havent played the game hcs...
if you want i can point to you the problematic tracks, i will test them later when i finish my job
I don't know, I've listened to bh1f a few times from a few different versions of the rip (from before I started eliminating stuff and back when I was using the general MIDI soundbank) and it sounds the same (and maybe my music sense is broken but it doesn't sound like anything is missing to me). Could you be so kind as to let me know how I could get to where this is played in the game so I could compare? Is there a certain point in the song where it is very obvious? Like at 1:00 the bass drops out suddenly, but it sounds musically right to me. Maybe you could provide a brief, low-quality MP3 recording of a track to contrast with the USF?
You're right to ask how I can make decisions about a game I've never heard the music from, but that's why I'm asking y'all to judge for me.
I do have some mp3s but only a few tell me how i could send them to you...
When i get home i'll tell u every problematic track that i can remember and the time when these problems occure. Oh and the bass drops out suddenly in many tracks. As i remember the bass never stops playing
In the game most of these tracks play randomly just pause the game and every time u unpause a different track is played. Mind the indoors music tracks are different.
Anyway ill help as much as i can if u want a good BH rip...
I figured out what I was missing: all the other parameters to the synth and seq config fcns. Like the maximum number of voices or events, which was set too low for Body Harvest. So I copied all the values over and things sound a lot better. bh1f is awesome. The prelim is updated.
Gema, thanks for sending all the MP3s. Let me know if this is close enough.
I'm glad you figured this out, Body Harvest sounds Perfect now, Good work hcs....
..and thanks again for the soundtrack, this game has some of the most unsetting tunes ever, much more atmospheric than any Resident evil or Silent hill game out there.. almost saves the game from its horribly generic graphics :)
I've got stuff in place to recognize all the initialization functions I need. It turns out Forsaken is absolutely standard with the exception of not using a sequence bank file. If I can track down how its sequences are stored I can rip it.
I tested this program out on Nintama Rantarou 64, which has absolutely awful music so fortunately it didn't take me very long, though it sounds right. I can now run some other games through it and rip them fairly quickly through the driver, assuming that they are standard (unfortunately quite a few seem to share Forsaken's disregard for Nintendo's sequence bank file format).
Bah, thought I could get Chopper Attack done, too, but it uses custom callbacks for some effects and I'd rather not go tracing all that down. It'll be a custom rip when the time comes.
This sucks, Killer Instinct Gold looks perfectly in line, yet the player crashes. I'm using the same version of libultra they used to build the game, what the hell could I be doing wrong?
I like to stick with the "whoever tags it appropriately first" thing. On that subject, I'll try to get Blast Corps up soon, sorry for holding back on that, PdZ's tags are fine.
I forced Mace to loop, it has a less-than-nice pause before it does so. Oh well. prelim2 is on the way to the server now.
I also discovered what was causing my attempted Diddy Kong Racing and Killer Instinct Gold rips to fail, they're now uploading.
I also decided to go ahead and finish the generic Jet Force Gemini rip just to see how bad it is. It's pretty bad (unless the music is supposed to sound broken). I'm uploading it anyway so y'all can experiece the horror. It seems like Rare used the exact same interface as Nintendo's sequence player but the rewrote the internals enough that it's almost compatible. I'm also having a hell of a time trying to do a normal rip of this game.