GYM Sets by holyice7 at 1:31 PM EDT on July 8, 2009
I'm wondering how the old Genesis format GYM is timed and ripped. I'm trying to listen to one of my favorites, Sonic 3D Blast, but half the tracks are cut off before the end, like some idiot timed them, and the format seems to have been been put out of use by VGM, which is a shame, since the emulation for Genesis in VGM sounds like crap.
What can I do to fix this almost ten-year-old GYM set?
Given the info here, GYM does not support any internal header or tagging information. This means it doesn't have a simple time value you can update. It seems like you'll need to rerip the set. I guess that only answers half of your question, maybe someone else can tell you how to rerip it.
...SmartOne, I've just gone through your suggested method with a few emulators, and it sounds...exactly the same as it does on Winamp. The percussion is full of white noise, and half the high notes are drowned out, none of which happens with the GYMs.
As it is I'm cutting these tracks together by hand, but some of them have chunks missing. Anyone know the ancient and mythic rituals by which GYMs are ripped? Subsequently...anyone willing to give this one a go, since I have a hunch it's not one of the easier methods.
Blah blah blah. The last time a GYM set had a shaky tempo was when the person recording it didn't have a computer that could handle running a Genesis emulator.
I'm less concerned about accuracy, and more about precision. If something sounds like shit, that's all well and good, but the soundtrack I remember is tinted through the nostalgic glaze of my memories, and it sounds clear and chip-tune-ie.
I seem quicker to bitch these days, anyway, as relentless searching has found the DGen emulator, which careful listening causes me to suspect that it's the very same emulator that the current Sonic 3D Blast GYM set was recorded on. I'll record a set and submit it to Zophar within the week if I feel like anyone cares enough about GYMs any more to bother with the effort.
I might just be better off throwing a set of mp3s out there to anyone who would actually want this stuff.
Yeah, I loaded up the sonic 3d blast vgz set I've got and the foobar plugin was having a TON of trouble with the low end stuff and the percussion, Rusty Ruin 1 for example... sounds horrendous, gym set from zophar meanwhile sounds fine. Loaded it up with that VGM_Play thing in kega too, and aside from being insanely inconvenient, it sounded the same as it did on foobar. So, really, just a +1 that the problem exists. Somehow I doubt it's just an issue of inaccuracy, unless the gym format managed to inaccurately replace horrendously staticy snare samples with decent ones. If so, thanks, sounds much better :/
Well I have no idea what happened in the last two hours. I opened DGen, and the percussion sounded crystal clear the first time, now it sounds like crap every time I open it again, and I can't get the GYMs to log worth anything. I'll probably need to find another emulator, but not tonight.
If you want to have a look around, fridgey, be my guest. I'll even take something with WAV logging, I just need it to have high-end sound emulation. This is just taking a lot longer than I thought it would, and I have Xrays to be taken tomorrow...
...Never mind, apparently you can draw blood from a stone. The GYMs coming from a ten-year-old, outdated emulator somehow sound far better than the sound output the thing itself is producing.
I'll take the time to furrow my brow and rub the bridge of my nose at this tomorrow, however, as the curiosity causing my insomnia has now been solved.
I'm not sure what you think I meant by that post. What I did was I went and uninstalled chipamp to get rid of that VGM plugin that didn't do me any good anyway, because it was screwing up my GYM plugin, because the old Sonic 3D Blast files had some sort of basic tags on them, and I was curious to see if it listed what emulator was used. Thankfully, I found Megasis on some abandoned Japanese Geocities page.
The point is that these GYMs are as good as the original set because...this is the emulator used to record them. I don't know what the hell is wrong with the output of all the others, but this one works.
The docs for the Sonic 3D Blast VGMs do acknowledge some issues with the set:
Some tracks sound a little funky, like Title Screen and Game Complete. Simple Explanation: This is due to inaccuracies in the VGM Format and so there's nothing I can do about it.
Some of the Drums have noticeable white noise. This is in the game as well, but due to the same stuff above, it's more noticeable and can't be fixed.
Maybe it's just me, but VGM seems to work fine with Game Gear games, but not Genesis games. From the distortion I'm hearing, and this is just me with my limited scope of how distortion works, maybe the whole thing is a hardware emulation issue having to do with the Genesis drawing more power to its sound chip than the Game Gear did, which causes severe distortion.
Well, it's an interesting discussion either way...but in the meantime, I'll upload my GYM set to Zophar's.
The VGM sounds like your GYM recording (actually better) in Fusion with VGM_PLAY, which proves that it is an emulator accuracy issue. I really tried to hear a problem and compared the Sound Test to the VGM. They are identical. The VGM recording you provided sounds like the old in_vgm included in Chipamp. Chipamp is extremely outdated, by the way, as is in_vgm. I think Dark Pulse's statement in the set info is incorrect.
Until someone (perhaps Maxim) writes a more accurate plugin, I'm stuck with Fusion ROM-building fun.
The drums will never sound the same between GYM and VGM. The reason for this is that the playback sample rate has to be approximated for GYM, but will always be smooth. Whereas for VGM, the samples are quantized to 44100Hz timing, including any flaws in the original game playback code, such as sound code which doesn't play samples during the vsync interrupt, causing silent gaps at 60Hz. Smoothing out the playback rate to avoid these gaps and possibly filter noise out would require considerable effort on the part of the player.
As for the FM chip emulation being too muffled, the frequency response depends on the emulator and the resampling algorithm used on the output. The result should be binary accurate, but perhaps could use a high frequency boost to match the actual hardware. Eh, I don't know.
I tried it in VGM_PLAY and still thought the drums sounded a bit crunchy. The hats weren't overwhelming the rest of the music like in the example track, though. Everything else sounded fine.
personally, i'd rather have the convenience of tags and a music player than sacrifice those for the sake of (seemingly debatable) accuracy. VGM sounds great to me in fb2k, not sure what the problem is.
True, foo_gep can't write tags to VGM/Z, but maybe I can update it to support that functionality. Of course, the way I read the tags into dual fields, it will be a pain detecting which of the configurable fields will go into which tags in the file.
For instance, English/Japanese title will always be read as title_e and title_j respectively, but configuration determines which of those is read as the normal title field. The tag writer will always see all three. Perhaps I should make it so if it's set to prefer English, the _e fields will be ignored on write and filled from the normal fields. Moo.
Well the reason I wanted the most accurate emulation I could get (GYM, not VGM through some convoluted mechanism that sounds no different despite what someOne may say), was because Winamp is ceaselessly being a giant, crashy bitch, so it's more prudent for me to convert all my soundtracks into lossless streams and tag them from there, which also allows me to fade them by hand if need be, as was with the GYMs.
And of course it allows me to provide them to my friends who enjoy the same music I do, but can't be arsed to figure out how a few dozen plugins work.
Winamp has been intent on crashing for me every time I close it, and sometimes when I hit 'stop.' And about a third of the time there's a script failure when the program itself is loading. It's been happening nonstop for about a year, no matter what version, addons, or whatever, across two computers.
Kode54 said that VGM logs the exact chip instructions, which means the format is perfectly accurate. The approximation of GYM's (DAC portion?) is artificial filtering that sounds smoother, likely reminiscent of the original hardware. Also remember that the Genesis Model 1 HD sounds very different than the Model 2, for example.
GYM is a ripped format, resulting in larger file sizes, among other shortcomings.
Since VGM is exact and assuming VGM_PLAY is flawless, Fusion (considered the most accurate Genesis emulator,) offers the most pristine reproduction.
Steve Snake and others work hard to investigate the completely undocumented hardware filtering of the Genesis. Like I said, the Filter option in Kega is already quite good.
Well, maybe you omitted some part of your explanation as to how to get the VGM in Kega thing to work, but I couldn't draw any blood from that stone; it sounded just like the straight-up VGM file played through any number of different plugins.
I might look deeper into it if I come up with another GYM/VGN rip I want/need to do in the future, but for now, this sounds just like I remember it.
Yeah, if the process is simply to drag the vgm to the vgm_play exe, then run the resulting .bin file in fusion... then it still has the awful drum distortion. Even if there's some step elsewise, considering the GYM files sound great, I can't imagine messing with that process instead.
If the distortion you notice is noise in the DAC, it's because the sound driver code for the game probably isn't the greatest. The VGM format (as far as I know) is a perfectly accurate log. What you are hearing is what the game is instructing the chips to produce, unmuffled, unfiltered, and as clear as a bell. A hairy bell.
Well, from what I'm hearing, the VGM and the actual sound test sound exactly the same in Fusion. Which, again, is nowhere near as bad as that example mp3 that was provided.