Damn, now I'm not sure which. He mentioned it a while ago in his long-gone forums... but I always mix those computers up. =(
Only an ear-dead imbecile monkey would want to edit the music in Streets of Rage 2. Seriously. We are talking about one of the best soundtracks made with an FM chip ever. You don't fucking edit a masterpiece like this, not anymore you would try digital-recoloring the Mona Lisa. Extracting the tracks would be an interesting idea, though.
This would also serve to port the engine itself to other games or hacks. I don't know how it compares to the Cube driver, mind you.
Well the Driver itself is out of the rom now. Not that its much use without the music. Also I got some compressed art out of the rom as well thanks to the Decompresser that Red Crimson, the guy I'm working on the disassembly with created. So far, here are the offsets for the art: Mr.X head from opening Sequence. 25000 Mr.X Hand from opening sequence. 25722 ????? 25fe0 ????? 275c0 ????? 27a90 Round Title Card Graphics 341e0 Character Select Portrait Graphics 34A98 Galsia and Donovan 161B90 Round 1? 100ff8 Trashcan Object 106ae0 Lead Pipe 1402b8 Knife 14040e Explosion Graphics 1bbe80 Y.Signal 166e3e Electra 01647CA Bongo 0168FB8 Hakoryu 1825CC Crow 01979B6 Jet 19A29A Mifune 1B972C Kunai 1BB8E4 Katana 1BBB52 Flare Bomb 1BBD68 Storm 1BCA08 Molecule 1BF99C MR.X Sitting down 01D01E8 Vehilits 1EA3B6 The ones with question marks for names, are ones that I have no clue what they are due to them not using the default pallete. The ones with them next to their names, I'm unsure of the identity of due to the same reasons. I'll be looking for more compressed art but so far, I've only been getting garbled shit that obviously isn't sprite data. I've been using Son Map Ed to view the art as its the closest thing the SOR community has to an art editor.
Well, Red Crimson (the guy I was being helped by) has disappeared. The decompressor he gave me only worked on decompressing the offsets he found. When I entered an offset that wasn't on there, it didn't decompress it correctly so I ended up with a big ass file. Anyways, I can't get in contact with him so I've been forced to look for compressed art on my own. It would be alright if SonMapEd supported Streets of Rage 2 but it doesn't unfortunately. As a result, I'm having to load the rom and pump out offsets manually. Red Crimson gave me the offsets for some of the music as well as pointers but I forgot to write them down. All I have is the sound driver itself at this time. He also gave me the offset for the Primary enemy and character palletes as well but I also forgot to write it down. As a result, I've been hunting the pallete offsets in SonMapEd manually. Luckily, I did save the primary pallete to a .BIN file so I'd know where it was since, I entered it into SonMapEd after Crimson Red told me what it was. Even with my primary help gone, I've been making some decent progress. (as far as locating compressed art is concerned.) Annoyingly though, looking for it manually in SonMapEd is very grueling at times because on occasion, certain offsets will cause SonMapEd to crash by closing istelf without a message. Certain offsets can also cause some weird fucked up things to appear that a clearly not part of the sprite offsets. The crashing as well as the sprites being fucked up, forced me to have to split Blaze's tileset into two halves because not only were the sprite tiles in the second half of her tileset messed up, but I just couldn't get a good offset without the program fucking up. Other than that though, my progress is good. All of the heroes and a majority of the normal enemies are out of the way. For some reason, certain sprites are garbled up. One such sprite set, I've noticed as garbled up and filled with colored pixels, are the Mr.X Sprites from the opening sequence. However, this is one of the offsets that Red Crimson's decompressor can decompress and it comes out just fine when decompressed this way. This must mean that several sprites are using some special compression format that SonMapEd can't read.
I found the DAC location in Z80 RAM at $1FFF in KMod. Snare is 82. And the music stuff is at $FFFFA008 in 68k memory.
Wait, DAC for what? nineko pointed out Streets of Rage 2 doesn't use DAC. I found all the DAC samples for Streets of Rage 1 two days ago and cracked the compression yesterday. Not too sure about 3 though.
Why are we still arguing over this? The sound driver's already been found and dumped by me with the help of someone else. I f you want it it can be found at offsets 559C2 - 579C1
Glisp said it was okay, so I'll just say it here. In the Streets of Rage I REV01 ROM, music pointers are at $7288C. There are seventeen (17) 32-bit pointers into ROM; two of them are identical (Name Entry and Round Clear). Unsure about the rest.
FWIW, SOR2 uses the DAC for voices (of enemies dying, special move shouts, etc). So does SOR3, but I'm not sure if SOR3 has any DAC in its music too (and I wasn't sure about that of SOR2 until Nineko explicitly said so). There must be some Z80 code in the ROM, somewhere. It might be a very small amount of code if it's purely for playing voices, but it must be there. It might be compressed or encoded in some way, which would be why it hasn't been found yet. Also, Tweaker, according to the version of the SCHG Music Hacking page available at the time of the original post, neither SOR2 nor SOR3 even have their driver names in the list. So just because Glisp only "found plain ASCII text within a ROM", it doesn't "not help anything", as he has indeed identified the name of the sound driver used by this game. Just because you know everything about the S1 SMPS driver and can make sound test eyecandy with your genius doesn't mean you should dismiss even the simplest of finds as "absolutely nothing".
*PCM also, if you want to know if the game uses PCM.... http://oerg866.randomsonicnet.org/vgmdump.html
DAC stands for Digital (to) Analog Converter. It's always used when you want to convert something from digital to analog. Almost all the soundcards have a DAC, to convert your audio files into electric signals which make the speakers play. PCM is a standard used to record audio files, and it stands for Pulse Code Modulation. The Genesis, in particular the YM2612, has a DAC, used to play samples, typically stored in PCM (or ADPCM) format. In the end of the day it's not something I would lose sleep on. Anyway you don't need external utilities to know if a game uses the DAC (yes, it's correct to say so, because the game uses the DAC features of the 2612), as most emulators have the option to mute individual channels. So, if from Gens, you disable the DAC channel (yes, because it is a fucking DAC channel), you can tell if the game is using FM drums or PCM samples.
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=Oerg (deleted))--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Oerg (deleted))</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->(facepalm image)[/QUOTE] No, seriously. I'm not being a noob, I'm asking a serious question. DAC stands for Digital to Analog Conversion, which could be any algorithm to map from a bitstream to something audible, though the simplest way to do DAC is simply playing samples, and this is what the YM2612 DAC channel refers to. PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation, which is uh, playing samples. So, I ask again. Aren't DAC (by which I mean, "the YM2612 DAC channel") and PCM the exact same thing? If not, then how the fuck does SOR2, a plain Genesis game, play PCM without using the DAC channel?
I wasn't saying that Oerg is right. In fact I edited my post above to clarify. The samples are in PCM format, and they're played through the DAC channel. Not a big deal. btw you can play PCM samples also using the PSG channels if you really want. But PWM (pulse width modulation) might be a better option due to the bad quality of said PSG channels.
Digital to Analog Converter is an electronic component that converts digital to analog, which can be used for basically anything, so that it is a DAC doesn't make it an audio component. thanks.
I say "DAC sample" because it is a PCM sample formatted for and output by the DAC. Therefore, DAC sample. I say the same for the PWM and I say the same for DPCM. It's all to denote the hardware that the sample is meant to be played by. Arguing the semantics only increases ambiguity; any sample can be a PCM sample, but not every PCM sample can be a DAC sample right out of the box. The driver names are not in that list because they're not SMPS, you daft little monkey. And the names of those sound drivers have already been found by DJ Squarewave years upon years ago and are extremely easy to find if you actually take three seconds out of your day to look in the proper locations. I will award a "well done" to Glisp for doing the obvious thing and looking in the ROM, since the SoR2 driver name is apparently not explicitly mentioned within that list, but it still did nothing in terms of actually working out the sound format and as such does warrant the ridiculous amount of ego and praise he demanded for finding it. That said, this conflict had already been settled weeks ago and everybody stopped giving a shit. Nice of you to dig up old dirt and stir up shit over absolutely nothing relevant as of this time period, though. And Marc made the sound test, you inconsiderate prick.
A DAC is not a sample player. It just converts data ._. So a proper way would be...nothing actually. Samples are the actual data that you shove into the sound chip. That's at least how I (and I think TmEE too) understand.
