You know how on that one wiki the Sound driver for SOR 2 was an unknown custom? Well now there is a name for it. (if this is indeed what it is anyway.) I've started extensively scrolling through Streets of Rage 2 in a hex editor looking for text entires and documenting them. While looking through I found the following text at offsets 00040010 to 0004005F: MUSIC DRIVER Mucom-MD Ver0.85 Programmed by T.Maruyama <M.N.M Software> Here's photographic proof: Looks like I can do some stuff after all. I'm not as useless as I thought. *Smug Grin*
You found plain ASCII text within a ROM. This really doesn't help anyone find out how to edit the music in the engine. It doesn't help anything.
I know but at least we now know what sound driver SOR 2 uses at least. Rox thought it was an older version of the Ancient Sound Driver. That step will come later. I'm going to be "attempting" a split disassembly of SOR 2 as soon as I get done documenting the locations of all the legit text entries. At least I found something I can actually say I found.
This while not a super deep find, is considered amazing over at the sor community. We really are that behind considering the very few members know how to hack the games over there either haven't found much or don't really do anything interesting. At most we've seen hidden tiles of biker sprites not used in the lost levels of bare knuckle 3 and a few unused text. We don't know much about this sound driver either so that's at least one thing we do know now. Keep looking glisp you'll find something, I suggest streets of rage 1 or 3 since those have scans of stuff that might be in the roms.
Well, I've been meaning to download another SOR 1 file but I've been busy digging through SOR 2's text. Every time I try to open my SOR 1. BIN file in my hex editor it doesn't load for some reason..... hm..... It just takes me to the directory list menu for some strange circumstance. I really don't want to touch BKIII yet because there is a ton of hacking going on with it in recent years.
I disagree. It gives a name for the engine. This makes researching easier, because, well, you have a name to look for. Also, fun fact, SOR1 is known to use SMPS
Yeah, I know that. I also know it uses a custom 68K version of the said sound driver. Also I think Tweaker just said it because it was me who found it and not some one else. (he's always expected me to be a noob so I guess this caught him off guard a little.)
No, I said it for two reasons—number one, your discovery is not revolutionary, important, impressive, or helpful towards eventually making the music in Streets of Rage 2 editable by the public... or anyone, for that matter. Secondly, I said it because the sheer arrogance that you're exerting simply because you found a piece of ASCII text in a ROM is absolutely mind-blowing. You did nothing significant; if you consider something like this significant, then your grasp of technical skill in ROM hacking is even worse than I could have possibly imagined. Anyone with the skill to actually crack the music in the game would have found that text in the span of three seconds with little-to-no effort of their own. You have not helped a single bit in unearthing anything. This is like saying that finding the song credits in Sonic 3D Blast took effort when they were listed in plain text before each song stored internally in the ROM. Get off your high horse and stop trying to nab glory for something that means absolutely nothing. I fucking despise that attitude. Finally, don't assume you know the purpose or rationale behind my actions as if you know me. You know nothing about me. Take your half-assed assumptions and shove them up your ass.
Yeah, you're right. I guess I am letting it all go to my head. Still I did something (for once.) and I'm happy about what I did. Shouldn't that be all that matters. Besides Tweaky Boy, it means that since we have a name, we can now learn a bit more about the sound driver. Also since when did you start caring about SOR anyway? Everytime I've brought up an SOR thread in the past, be it music related or not, you've ignored it. You are probably one of the strangest people I've ever met on the internet just for this. (not that its nesscesarily a bad thing or anything.) That being said, I'm getting familiar with the hex editor and its functions so cut me some slack. You could at least be supportive of my finding just a little. I'm sorry I assumed stuff about you Tweaker. You know as Sidd mentioned, for the SOR community, this is impressive. I never said I wanted to hack the sound driver now did I? I just said I found what it was called. You know what, maybe I should just stop coming here just because I seem to be of no value at all to the community. Good day to you sir! Hmph! *leaves*
why not try editing the driver or maybe try editing one of the tracks, edit bytes in places and jot the results of that down, do more and more to understand the format as best as you can, once you've understood the format and maybe written a full document about it, then post it up here. That's what I'd attempt to do if I had time for it.
Even if it wasn't something too hard to find, nobody had found it yet until he decided to take a look, so perhaps he deserves some recognition? I mean, it's something not even the people who have been researching these sound drivers knew about. By the way, about this text from the ending... Does it also appear in PAL mode? I really didn't remember it showing up.
You know what, I just decided to change my mind. The community looks kind of dull without me. Also I felt like a pompous jerk. I was just trying to attempt at being part of the "in crowd". Oh and to answer your question markey. I honestly have no clue where the music files are even located at this point. However, when I start doing the disassembly I should be able to learn a great deal more about music locations and such. Yeah, this shit is very unimportant. I actually had a little bit of fun though: I only did it for lulz rather than it being serious. I just altered Galsia's name because I was bored and wanted to have a bit of fun. Oh and to answer your question Iceknight. You get that message after beating the game on hardest difficulty setting. Its the level select cheat it also unlocks the Mania and Very Easy difficulty settings. Also Skate's Bare Knuckle 2 name is present in the US ROM btw. I knew it was in the PAL version because the Japan and PAL versions are multiregional with one another but not with the US Genesis. Likewise the US version is region locked strictly to the US systems.
and that's WHY you do the research, to look, find, and understand the format I wouldn't say it's unimportant per se, although if you're going to disassemble the rom, then I'd be interested in seeing you go at that and making progress (Providing that you are infact attempting to and wont give up on it)
By unimportant shit I was referring to my finding. I should have been more specific, my apologies. =P I don't intend on giving up. To be honest with you, I feel like I'm completely on my own with this anyway. All my life, I'vew asked for rom hacking help and I usually get "Do it yourself." in reply. So you know what, I'm going to "do it myself". And just because I want to get back at those who told me to "do it myself" I'm going to tell those individuals that they can't help me even if they want to. But I probably will come to you if I need any help with something, just as long as you don't really care Markey. It will only be as a last resort though. I'll start on the disassembly just as soon as I finish documenting all the locations of text clusters within the rom. If you are wondering what I was doing or how I found this, I'll tell you. I litterally held down the down button or searched for words. However, I found the music driver by coincidence. After I had found everything, decided to scroll down to see if I could find any other shit by holding the down button on my keyboard. I spent almost my whole day doing that and I think its starting to take its toll on me. I've got a big headache now! XD There's a big gap of data between the menu and Character name text and the enemy text with a whole shit load of things. I'm pretty much still in that part of the rom.
I can relate, why do you think I've been working on single projects my own for nearly a year now? what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger I don't mind helping as long as: A) you learn to chill abit more, take it easy, don't immediatly jump to conclusions about what you "think" people think of you. B) don't pester me too much, I will find time to help on certain things (I have a limit), but I don't say no for no goddamn reason. I'm gonna leave this now, (inb4 topic gets locked or whatever)
For what it's worth, I just did a very simple check, and it appears that the driver completely runs on the 68k, no Z80 code is present at all, you can even disable the Z80 emulation altogether in Gens. Also there is no DAC (which isn't surprising due to the lack of Z80). This makes a bit harder to locate the driver and the songs, because if it was Z80 code it would have been easily findable (as for Cube games). Just throwing this here.
Nice find Nineko. I'll be sure to take note of what you said and credit you in any future research notes I make.
I will try to help you to locate the songs. Right now I took a savestate while a song was playing, and as you know the bytes from $1E4 to $3E3 in a Genecyst savestate contain the YM2612 registers, including the ones used to store the voices (if you didn't know you can just get the Genesis_Savestate_Viewer). Once we have the voice we can look for that data in the rom, to see if each song comes with its voices attached below (à la "pure" smps) or there is an "universal voice bank" (like Cube does, as well as Sonic 3 to some extent). Stay tuned.
