Compose 64 music by larkz at 11:08 PM EDT on June 5, 2009
Hi all. I've been interested in composing music for the sounds found in games like Zelda OOT. I've read about USF/ miniUSF and usflib, and was wondering if it is possible to somehow use a midi track to send information to the usflib file - (or whatever else might be involved). Sorry for my noobishness
No one has yet done that for Zelda, I don't think anyone has researched the format enough to figure out how to do it. It is certainly possible in principle, though. messiaen has been doing some cool stuff with importing music into Mario 64, conceptually it'd be the same sort of thing, but someone would have to figure out the format and write a tool to import midi or some other notation format.
Pretty much all Nintendo 64 first-party games use the same sequence format (with a few variations from game to game). I have a bunch of notes about Mario 64, which are also valid for Zelda:
I also wrote a (primitive) .mml importer that works reasonably for Mario 64, so-so for Mario Kart 64 and badly for Zelda OOT. The results overall aren't very satisfactory, but as least it shows that the specification is correct:
Again, you probably won't achieve the results you want with these tools, though they have been helpful for me to get some simple custom music in Mario 64. As for Zelda OOT, I have only made a few simple music replacements to test the tool.
The best thing would be if someone wrote a MIDI importer, but due to the differences between MIDI and this format, some complex parsing would be needed (ie, split simultaneous notes into sub-tracks and stuff).