In '07 someone pointed out this cool little puzzle involving nested encrypted rars. I was looking for it again now and it seems to have vanished from the face of the net, so I dug it up from a backup and put it on the Hall of Lost Files. Woo.
by nensondubois at 9:52 PM EST on February 2, 2010
I put up pdfs of some papers by T. W. Malone about learning and video games. I couldn't find the last one (heuristics for instructional video games) free anywhere, so I figure this might help someone in the future who's looking for it. It seems like the ACM allows noncommercial reproduction.
Does anyone remember the program "OpenSPC" for MS-DOS? Is there any source code floating around for that?
It was practically the only SPC player that supported sequencing to IT file, but the IT sequencing was horribly bugged and off tune, I'd love to take a shot at fixing that shit and also porting it to win32...
Then again, I keep hearing of this "VGMTrans" but does that only make DLS banks and MID files? Or can it sequence game music to ImpulseTracker v2.00 modules?
VGMTrans only makes MIDI files and DLS files, yes. It might also export SoundFonts (I forget offhand), but it certainly doesn't export modules.
There must be OpenSPC source floating around somewhere because I've found Link to the Past MIDI sequences floating around claiming to have been converted from the SPC's with a "modified version of OpenSPC"...which means someone had to have modified the source in the first place. I wouldn't know where to begin telling you to look, but my guess is it's out there somewhere.
I'm merely looking into porting to win32, (Pretty DAMN important), keeping the basic thing it had in window, fix the ADPCM decompression routines and writing so that the fucking samples aren't scratchy and off tune, fix the IT Dump so it's intelligent and adheres to some sort of standard instead of "Shittons of rows and play them really fast" bullshit.
All in all, it wont be easy, especially someone who isn't adept at C.
@ RG996: As for the infamous offkey-problem that adhered to pre-SNESAmp SPC players, I do believe they played the pitches at a factor of 1.024:1. For example, they play 8khz samples at 8192hz and the 32khz samples at 32768.
In short, the modern SPC players play at 1:1 perfect-pitch as they should.
How do I know this theory, you may ask? Simple. I'm a MOD-fanatic, and know that the base 8363hz frequency used in the Amiga is a perfect key of C. 8192hz, is just higher-enough pitch than 8k-even, for myself to notice. Even-multiples of 1k (2k, 4k, etc) are more a C and B hybrid note if you will; one can never tell, it's that offkey! :P
P.S.: Try to make it an 8-channel IT with panning commands, as opposed to 16 channels with volume commands, and we'll call it even.
As for why the IT seemingly HAD to have that many commands at once, I have two words for you: SPC-Rape.
just like to mention that i'd also like to see an improved OpenSPC, as it's been getting a lot of mileage for sample collecting in recent times. however someone reliably informed me that the sample decoding is kind of iffy, maybe that could be improved as well... though i guess you already know.
that said, SPC tool seems to work well for this purpose.
I had a look at the source... Main thing, IF you want to port the code, is getting the core to assemble...The version I seen uses GAS ASM which to me, the syntax is hideous. The GUI port shouldn't be that hard, same with the Win32 audio output. I have a very petite libAO clone in WinMM that works great, and blargg has wrote a SDL driver thats even better....
If I wanted to do a Win32 port, I would at least use MASM. Or at the very best, NASM.
That said, snes_spc would be awesome. Shouldn't be too hard shoehorning it into OpenSPCs's interface.
As a repayment of my eternal gratitude to HCS for the SJ source, I give you people this to put into the Hall.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1dlyid
Its a patch that fixes one of the biggest problems in Star Wars Rogue Squadron (PC version): the issues in the camera engine. Now the game is 100% playable, and as a added bonus, now you don't need the discs...
I tested it only on Windows 7 x64 though. But it works fine here for version 1.00 so I figured some gamers might like to play the game until the Nintendo 64 version has its microcode figured out.
Now with a bootleg video of Koji Kondo playing piano at a concert I went to in October, which had been deleted from Youtube. Not my video, don't recall whose it was and don't know how to find out.
I had accidentally deleted my copy, but I had made a backup last week (which I spent all last night recovering), and Mouser had saved another format as well.
edited 11:26 PM EDT November 3, 2011
Yay, just got another addition, CHEAP version 0.4, which is a Hoot extension I don't know much about.
I got a question - anyone have proper, full length version of the track that was used in Mass Effect 2 E3 trailer and in Assassin's Creed Revelations teaser trailer?
Some say it was made especially for ME2 trailer by, at the time, Bioware employee Jarrett Lee. However, since Ubisoft used the same track for ACR teaser, it's been suggested the track isn't Lee's - that was really made by Methodic Doubt (music library) and that it's maybe called "Black Dawn".
The best version currently available is a heavily edited clip with almost no sfx and voices left from the trailers (that was a monster job, kudos to whoever pulled it off):