[Xeta]

So, I've heard that the sound effects are the same format as in Sonic 1, so how would I find sound effect locations?

[Clownacy]

Are you sure about that? SCD Sound Effect Driver.asm's cfPtrTable begs to differ. That and the driver being a Z80 FM Type 1. I must be looking at the wrong driver.

Speaking of which, I really need to find the past music's driver. I just hope it's 68k. Though, it probably does a Chaotix, and has the Z80 do the processing, while the other processor just relays the output to the hardware. I can still dream, dang it! Wait, can't the Megadrive's own 68k access the Mega CD's program RAM? If so then potentially, the main 68k processes the game, and the Mega CD 68k handles the sound. There's still hope, dagnabbit!

This post has been edited by Clownacy: 28 August 2014 - 03:18 PM

[ValleyBell]

Xeta, on 28 August 2014 - 12:45 PM, said:

Now, here's a question. Is the SMPS engine exclusive to the MegaDrive (excluding the Master System, Game Gear, and Sega CD)?

I can confirm that SMPS exists for Master System, Game Gear, MegaDrive and Sega CD. Sega Pico seems to use SMPS, too, according to a new other people.
The first variants of SMPS were used in SMS games like Phantasy Star. It was preSMPS back then, which uses a different file header. The SMPS variant we know seems to be made for the MD, but got ported back to the SMS for games like Sonic 2, Chaos, Triple Trouble and Labyrinth.

Xeta, on 28 August 2014 - 01:18 PM, said:

So, I've heard that the sound effects are the same format as in Sonic 1, so how would I find sound effect locations?

For SFX, Sonic CD uses a Z80 sound driver stored in LOGO_M.MMD (510 Beta) or MDINIT.MMD (all other versions). I'll just quote my hacking notes:

General Pointer List:	06D7 (JUE, 720 Beta) / 1900 (510 Beta) (Z80 RAM)
SFX Pointer List:	06EB (JUE, 720 Beta) / 0B00 (510 Beta) (Z80 RAM)
Z80 Snd Driver Offset:	0001DA (JUE, 720 Beta) / 000B10 (510 Beta)
Additional Z80 Data #1:	0015F8 (510 Beta only) (goes to Z80 RAM 0B00)
Additional Z80 Data #2:	001D90 (510 Beta only) (goes to Z80 RAM 1900)

Trivia: The 510 beta driver is still able to play music. (although it doesn't have any songs to play) The other drivers can only play SFX.

Clownacy, on 28 August 2014 - 03:16 PM, said:

Speaking of which, I really need to find the past music's driver. I just hope it's 68k.

Just open the ISO and get the SNCBNK##.BIN files. Each file contains an 68k SMPS PCM driver, one song, a few PCM SFX and the respective samples.

[Hitaxas]

That would mean that it uses very few z80 sfx as each SNCBNK##.BIN houses a handful of samples, some are repeats which are present in every single file (but that's due to how the game loads levels, if I am correct). What other formats might Sonic CD use, and where could those be located then?

[ValleyBell]

The SNCBNK##.BIN files contain only PCM stuff, so it does PCM SFX. The Z80 driver does all FM SFX.

In the sound test, there is "FM", "PCM" and "DA". Everything "FM" is done by the Z80 driver (and they removed tons of stuff from it so that there was enough space in the Z80's RAM for all the SFX). Everything "PCM" is done by the SMPS 68k/PCM drivers (SNCBNK##.BIN files).
And that's all.

[Hitaxas]

Edit: I'm an idiot. Since those sfx aren't pcm they cannot be played in audio playing software. >.<


Edit 2: Any chance anybody has ripped the driver and sfx from Sonic CD then?

This post has been edited by Hitaxas: 14 September 2014 - 07:40 PM

[trykaar]

I am working on a disassembly of Dragon Crystal for the Master System, released in Europe only sometime in 1991, and I believe it is also using SMPS:

See here, and compare it to the known SMPS Sonic 2 SMS disassembled sound driver here- the flags used are different, but the code is otherwise nearly identical.

Dragon Crystal for Game Gear, which has a definitive release date a little earlier, in December 1990, shares the same memory addresses for its sound control, so it's very likely it is also SMPS. The two games have completely different soundtracks, though- I've wondered if it was due to some difference in sound capability between the two systems or the two sound engines. I know the Game Gear supports panning and never has the FM chip (which doesn't seem relevant, as the GG version seems to have come first here), is that the only real difference?

Both Dragon Crystals have a lot in common with Fatal Labyrinth for the Genesis/Mega Drive as well, which is SMPS-z80 according to this thread- Fatal Labyrinth was also released sometime in 1991 through the Game Toshokan download service, but I don't know whether it was before or after DCSMS. All three games share the same composer, E. Fugu, and I suspect that the games were developed in very close sequence if not simultaneously. It might be interesting to compare them to each other as a snapshot of SMPS across platforms at that time.

[ValleyBell]

Researching and ripping SMPS drivers is fun, you know, so here is a bump for the release of my SMPS Research Package, now in version 4.

Summary of the contents:

• 35 SMPS 68k games (that means I ripped all known MegDrive SMPS 68k games, btw)
  
• 80 SMPS Z80 games + 12 Game Toshokan games
  
• 3 Sega Pico games
  
• more disassembled SMPS drivers (including Sega Pico, MegaCD SMPS and a few Master System drivers)
  
• comparisons of the coordination flags of various SMPS drivers
  
• updated and new tools (SMPSExtract was improved a lot and I wrote a few tools to analyze SMPS 68k and SMPS Z80 drivers)

Note: Even though Revenge of Shinobi and Streets of Rage are SMPS drivers at their core, their sequence format is completely different and largely matches Yuzo Koshiro's Mucom format. So I put them into the "Other" folder.


Because all the stuff got pretty large, I split the package into two parts.
Part 1 (rips and tools) (10.5 MB) and Part 2 (disassemblies) (20.6 MB)

Of course there is also a new version of SMPSPlay, supporting all the new stuff. (like Sega Pico PCM)
SMPSPlay v2.11: Win32/64 Binary (source archive, GitHub repo)

Enjoy!

[ICEknight]

Awesome!


...But some of the rips give me this error message:

Error opening Rips/Other/Revenge of Shinobi, The/config.ini
No extentions defined! Closing.

Any clues on how to avoid this?

[ValleyBell]

SMPSPlay can't play any of the rips in the "Other" folder, due to them using a fundamentally different format. (Because of this, they also important lack files like "config.ini" and "DefCFlag.txt").
Revenge of Shinobi for example uses separate coordination flag sets for FM and PSG channels. That's something no other SMPS game does (but Streets Of Rage), but it's commonly seen in games that use Koshiro's Mucom driver.

preSMPS rips are also working only partly, because some of them are untouched since I rewrote SMPSPlay. SMPSPlay still lacks support for preSMPS headers and Phantasy Star 2's chord mode.

[ICEknight]

Ah, Ok. I was wondering if I was doing something wrong...