Kega only allows you to dump .VGM or .WAV files, however IIRC Gens Plus! allows you to dump .gym files. That's probably what you're thinking of.
Well the format wasn't what I was really concerning myself with. Just the recording to a format like it. So yea. VGM, GYM. Whatever :specialed:
Hey guys... I have an odd request. Can someone with an existing Sonic Heroes installation for PC send me or upload a stock loading.txd file? It's located in the install directory under dvdroot/textures. I tried to edit it, but my program wasn't working properly and it got messed up. I had two directories, one with a stock Sonic Heroes and one for the edits, but somehow when I tried to open it a second time it redirected to the stock installation... The reason I'm asking here is because I can't find my discs for installation and I'm not about to download a pack of two ISOs just for one file. So can someone do this for me? Thanks in advance!
Is there a program to generate MIDI files out of the music in a Genesis game? I want to mess with the music in the Sonic games for a project I'm working on, but I'd like something a bit more accurate than what's on VGMusic. I checked romhacking.net, but I didn't see anything and I'm not exactly sure what to look for.
SMPS2XM might be of use to you. The song will need to be in Sonic 1 smps format, and the output will need to have the instruments filled in by you. Once you've got your XM made, you can then convert it to Midi. Other than that I can think of nothing else.
This is as good a place as any to report my experience with smps2mid, then: It's very erratic at working with files from S3&K, either that or all the ROMs online are messed up, as I had to go through 2 or 3 ROMs and various errors/freezes in order to get all the songs extracted (if I ever got them all; I'm not even sure, as I still need to name/organise them). S1/2 were OK, at least the few songs I tried. Aside from that, it's fantastic, and I thank you for making it - but it would be nice to get an idea of why I had those problems.
I had lots of problems with the pointer tables in S3K (because they're part of the Z80 sound driver, which is compressed) and half of the pointers it finds are wrong. Also some songs share data (LBZ2 uses parts of LBZ1 for example), and this causes even more problems when trying to convert the songs. But thanks for reminding me, the next time I work on it I'll try to fix the issues. I think Sonic 3 alone worked a bit better than S&K/S3K. I don't remember having issues with any other game (including Sonic 3D).
Great, thanks for the reply! I think, as far as I remember, you're right that S3 alone worked OK. And I think I got most of the songs eventually by trying a few dumps, possibly all but I can't be sure; I still have to go through the folder and name the MIDIs, as I just called them after their hexadecimal ID. Anyway, looking forward to any future versions! This and your various other tools are hugely useful things for everyone to have acccess to.
You can run a normal Kosinski decomp on the two portions of sound driver, one of which contains the pointer table and the other of which contains the bank table. I can find the proper offsets for them if you need them or they're not documented somewhere. Or you could just store the correct list in the program - since you presumably have to hardcode the table location anyway, it's probably not too much worse to just hardcode the pointer table itself, and you could then tack on some entries for the S3 tracks that aren't referenced. And/or you could support the forthcoming Sonic 3 Complete release which contains all the pointers uncompressed at the end of each actual music bank. (The current ones unfortunately have the same compression arrangement as S3K, albeit not at the same place in the ROM.)
I think I'll just decompress the driver. Maybe I could even try to find the pointers automatically. I gained some experience about these things when writing my SMPS extractor. I plan to support pointers within banks sometime. I've seen a few SMPS Z80 games use them (e.g. Dyna Brothers 2, IIRC).
okay, I want to extract the voice files from Sonic Heroes. What program would be the best choice. Also, I found a program that can open ADX files if anyone needs it. You can also make your own ADX files with it as well... though... I haven't been able to get looping to work, even with the looping option checked. Basically, yeah, this stuff is primarily related to Sonic Heroes PC. \
I'm not sure what program I used to do it with anymore as this was years ago, but I already have a complete rip of each and every one voice clip in SH-PC. :v: As for ADX-looping, that's simple. You need to use adxencd, a command-line tool. Now, one thing you gotta understand is that this program's looping works by samples and can only encode .wav to .adx (well, and .aif to .adx, but who uses aif? :v: ). An easy way to figure out sample numbers is to open the uncompressed .wav file in Audacity, changing the display on the bottom to samples instead of minutes and seconds and then selecting the area you want to loop. Note down the sample-numbers, you'll need those. Now use this command-line syntax: adxencd [nameoffile].wav -lps[samplenumber] -lpe[samplenumber] With -lps being the starting loop point, -lpe being the ending loop point. Don't put a space between lps/lpe and the sample number, either. Hope that was understandable.
Thanks for the advice Herm the Germ. I'll try that program out. The program I was using before was this one: http://www.moddingway.com/forums/thread-222.html Also, do you think you could send me those rips? Edit: I'm getting a 404 with the link to adxencd. Weird.
