I just picked up 3D Sonic 2 while it was on sale, now is it just me or does the "SEGA" cry sound absolutely horrible? It sounds incredibly compressed. The rest of the audio seems fine, but it's a rough start to booting up the game.
Remember when the extra music from the 3DS versions of After Burner and Outrun got ripped for use in emulators? Well, I just provided the decrypted ROM from the 3DS version to ctr of VGMRips to work his patching magic on Thunder Blade, as that one never got done when After Burner and Outrun was. https://www.dropbox....11396.ic17?dl=1 A new Z80 sound ROM for Thunder Blade featuring the extended music, for use in MAME/M1/Hoot/whatever you please. I'm sure the VGMRip guys will log the VGM files at some point too. It's great to finally have clean playable versions of these, as the ones on the Pony Canyon Galaxy Force/Thunder Blade CD were pretty horrible sounding.
With After Burner and Thunder Blade, as it's a straight replacement of one ROM which replaces the original pieces of music, so those *could* go into MAME, but I'm pretty sure they have a policy where they don't support ROMhacks unless there's evidence they were ever used in the arcade. The extra music in Outrun would require finding the patches for the 68K ROMS to to add the options on the music selection screen, which hasn't been done, although at a guess it could be possible. Didn't Cannonball add support for them? Or am I dreaming that?
Nowadays, MAME supports games like OutRun Enhanced Edition and Bubble Bobble Lost Cave, and those are not even official. EDIT: It also supports things like the English translation of Monster Land (straight from the Virtual Console release) and some prototype of Fantasy Zone II that I'm not sure where it came from (the PC demo, perhaps?).
You'd think considering how much I use MAME, I'd have actually noticed that... Heh. Thinking about it, considering they merged with MESS a while back, it makes sense that that hacks aren't quite as off limits any more. Although they're clearly keeping some kind of quality control as to what ROMs get in, unlike, say, HBMAME.
