xm3smps: now with more Visual Basic

I'll write up all the bubble bobble arcade songs in xm if you'd like.

 

And I'll make the songs sound legendary.

GO TEAM VENTURE!

 

I've had at least 5 different people coming to me about how to use this, so you're full of shit in that regard. They just don't tend to like posting is all.

Similarly, Sonic QX took about 3 years to actually start getting used correctly, so the issue isn't a lack of interest—just a lack of understanding. Perhaps more support (voice files, tutorials) would help draw interest, maybe?

You don't get a widely used program seconds after releasing—you have to work for it. You rely too much on people to figure things out by themselves, and it deters use.

 

I'd like to see work on the project, but I can't get any trackers to work right.

 

I would also like to see some more work done on this project, as mentioned before, much more people than 3 are interested in this project.

 

I'm still interested! That's four!

 

Even I plan to use it in my hack.

 

You can't get people interested if they still have no fucking idea what they're doing. Any program that makes it easier to have different music is a welcome for me but I have little to no fucking clue how this shit works. I'm not Marc, Puto, or Tweaker but shit man at least give me a bit more time before I figure this out and how to pump out decent sounding tracks before you decide the cancel it the day after you release it.

 

I also support this fact.

Mainly because I couldn't even figure out how to make voice files at all really, and the songs I did port had really bad voices. If this tool had continued work there would be much better use of it. But without more work the tool will not receive much attention really. You need to give this tool more time to grow basically, just orphaning it when it is a baby isn't going to make much happen.

Just my 2 cents.

 

Even I can figure out how it works, lamer. I mean, check out these sweet riffs!

With that said, you stop working on this thing and you're banned.

 

And I can personally attest to the fact that, given the right information, this is very easy to work. Let me break it down.

FM1-5 = melodic channels. FM is what voices are for... voices are the instruments in a song, basically. They are $19 bytes each, and you can copy them straight out of a song if you like. This program takes .bin files full of voices... so basically, if you take the voice data from the end of the song (and you can figure out how using SCHG:Music Hacking) and put it in its own file, you can use that with this program.

PSG is bascially square waves. You can have 3 of them at one time, OR, you can have two square waves plus a noise channel (which is for hi-hats). You know what hi-hats are, right? Come on dudes, look it up.
Don't know what a square wave is? Ever listen to NES or SMS music? Yeah, those are square waves. Use them, they're sexy.

DAC is for drums. DAC stands for Digital Audio Channel... so basically, it plays digital audio. Go figure. Sonic 1 has three drum samples you can use—kick (81), snare (82), and timpani (83, 88-8B). This is how we drop da beat, niggaz!

Now, each of these channels can only play one note at a time... this is called monophony. Playing chords in a single channel is called polyphony. You can do chords, you just need to split them amongst seperate channels. No biggie.

The nature of an XM file is very similar to SMPS music in the sense that it doesn't support polyphony, meaning everything is already monophonic. Cool, right?

So when you want to import an XM file, a good plan is to check out which song part is in each XM channel. You can do this using ModPlug Tracker, which can open up XM files, play them, view them, and edit them. Another cool thing about MPT is that you can import MIDIs to become XM files! Cool, right? You bet your sweet ass it is. It isn't always perfect, but it can turn out pretty sweet if you do it right.

The trick to good custom music is assigning channels right. Once you get that down, you're good to go. It just takes practice, and knowledge of the Genesis sound hardware—which I just gave to you. Now go out and practice. =P

 

Well-written. I think that if even I can figure it out (once provided with a file of voices from s3k) everyone else can, since I'm not exactly the brightest one here. Not even close.

 

Just a note, XM3SMPS actually has support for directly ripping voices out of a song.

 

Just a quick point/question I want to make.

It's obvious that a lot of people want to see this worked on even more. Even if you do not see the point, other people might. Would releasing your source so others can work on it be a possible second solution to this problem?