[vladikcomper]

Thorn, on 11 March 2013 - 01:57 PM, said:

vladikcomper: let me ask the obvious question, then... wouldn't it be practical to set up your driver starting from the Sonic 2 "clone" sound driver (a public, on-the-wiki port of the Sonic 1 sound driver to Sonic 2)? Granted, it's not 100% identical, but it does move things back to SMPS 68k. You've probably already thought of that and it's just not obvious in your answer, but I figured I should ask directly. I've considered looking into it myself, but :effort:.

Ehh, frankly, I totally forgot about Clone Driver =P

I've heard of it, but never used it myself, because I'm not hacking Sonic 2 per se. But considering it's 68K nature, this is definitely what I should be looking for. Thanks mentioning it. But that said, I'm still interested in pulling this thing with the original Sonic 2's sound driver.

EDIT: Quoted due to new page

This post has been edited by vladikcomper: 14 March 2013 - 02:53 PM

[ashthedragon]

Stupid question but...Can I have an already compiled .bin of Sonic 1 with the mega PCM driver working? I want to try it at real hardware but I've no idea of hot to compile asm

[vladikcomper]

ashthedragon, on 23 March 2013 - 06:37 PM, said:

Stupid question but...Can I have an already compiled .bin of Sonic 1 with the mega PCM driver working? I want to try it at real hardware but I've no idea of hot to compile asm

Here you go: https://dl.dropbox.c...h_MegaPCM_HQ.7z
This example features Mega PCM playing a digital song on the title screen and replaces some DAC samples in game.

Actually, I've already showed two Sonic 1 disassemblies with Mega PCM in this topic. Both of them also have already compiled ROM for your convenience, see s1built.bin file.

Also, compiling a disassembly is pretty easy, just run build.bat file. If everything is successful, assembler will generate a ROM file for you. It's usually named s1built.bin in case of a Sonic 1 disassembly.

[ashthedragon]

Thank you!

[You-Are-Pwned]

I just checked that version. Is it intentional that the Final Zone music plays in SBZ3? Could be a bug.

[vladikcomper]

You-Are-Pwned, on 29 March 2013 - 07:49 AM, said:

I just checked that version. Is it intentional that the Final Zone music plays in SBZ3? Could be a bug.

This is intentional. As well as different music in GHZ 2 and 3 and somewhere else.

Because this isn't exactly a clean Hivebrain's disassembly, secretly, this is S1 Hacking Studio 2.0 version of disassembly, so I quickly did some music swaps and game tweaks because I was bored. A bit modified disassembly doesn't affect the way you apply Mega PCM guides at all.

[PsychoSk8r]

Anyone else working with the attempt to get this running in Sonic 2?
So far, I've managed to use the Sonic 2 Clone Driver as a base to follow this guide, doing what's required along the way for compatibility, to get this in the game, The game runs, SMPS files that came with the clone driver play (running on the "MegaPCM.z80" Driver), but I'm getting garbled DAC ingame.
Excuse the poor host, but here's my resulting ROM:
http://www.mediafire...f8s9ydxvyo9pjnv
Kick and Snare are in there, but as ASM code instead ("dc.b"), as I'm having trouble with bincludes. Timpani is replaced with the kick sample for now. Oddly enough, the kick plays perfectly instead of the Sega Sound on the Sega Screen.

Edit: After some more inspection, and getting the BINCLUDES working correctly (thanks to mainmemory), It appears that it was struggling to play the samples provided with MegaPCM, I used some custom uncompressed samples from a while ago, and it worked. I'm checking now whether it will take some compressed samples I've had laying around.

This post has been edited by PsychoSk8r: 09 April 2013 - 05:26 PM

[vladikcomper]

Good job, PsychoSk8r!

I'm planning do a Clone Driver port as well and write a full guide, but I don't know when I can start, because now I have few other things I should finish first. Hope to get on it this month, eventually.

As for the garbled DACs issue you had, hearing how it sounds in the ROM you've provided, it looks like Mega PCM is trying to play compressed DPCM samples as uncompressed PCM. Ensure you've changed 'pcm' to 'dpcm' in playback flags for the compressed samples.

[PsychoSk8r]

I'm glad you'll take a look too, you're bound to know MPCM better than anyone else. =P
I've never been too big on hacking S2, but I have ported objects/routines between S1/S2 in the past (to test my limits). The Sound Driver is in, supports uncompressed custom samples, but I'll be damned if I can get dpcm working lol.
http://www.mediafire...9po8fbbx88c1cz8

Here are my results, complete disassembly, some bonus DAC samples I've had laying around. It's not quite there yet, but getting there. Hopefully this might help you a little.
Apologies if there are any files in there that shouldn't be, I did give the folders a quick once-over to remove unnecessary files. I think I may have left a rather large "DAC Sample" in the DAC folder (copied straight from a side-project). =P

[ValleyBell]

The fixed IncludeDAC macro for the Xenowhirl disassembly is:

IncludeDAC macro Name,Extension
Name:		label	*
	binclude	"dac/Name.Extension"
Name_End:	label	*
	endm

It took me a while to figure this out when I adding nicer sample tables to S2 Recreation.

[PsychoSk8r]

Haha, sweet. That should keep things neater. There's got to be some data somewhere on how macros work differently with the two assemblers. Such a shame we don't have one assembler that's supported globally. Also, the "strcmp" (which I loved the usage of in this case) added to the IncludeDAC macro is incompatible. Googling for a compatible alternative yielded no results. =P

[ValleyBell]

The AS manual has an example in Chaper 3.4.1 where two strings are compared in a sort of case insensitive way.
But there's indeed a lack of documentation for the assemblers. At least a txt with a link to the assembler manuals somewhere in the disassembly would be nice.

[PsychoSk8r]

Excellent link. I think perhaps we should attempt to provide documentation with each disassembly, perhaps just throw in a new folder "_Docs" or something. It could be immense amounts of help to anyone trying to familiarise themselves, or porting code. The biggest challenge faced with porting large amounts of code is compatibility between assemblers, I've found.
Thanks for that link. =P

[Caverns 4]

I would like to see this able to work in Sonic 2. Partly because that's what I am hacking, but also partly because the page for porting the Sonic 1 sound driver into Sonic 2 provides an ASM file that looks like somebody screwed with it. There's a bunch of unintelligible garbage data in the file, some of with is replacing pointers and addresses. implementing this might be a good solution even if it's a little more (lot more) advanced than what I was to do.

It looks really awesome, excellent work! I didn't know the genesis was capable of this!