Alright. I really want to learn how to rip music from MAME Roms. Does anyone know how to do that. Also I don't want the person who contributed the Sonic the Fighters OSV to Sonic Retro because, no offense to him/her but the rips sucked balls and aren't even worth listening to. I'm not just talking about it not being CD Quality (which I could care less about) but when Percussion of music is missing it lowers the awesomeness of the music rips drastically. Trust me there are way better rips of Sonic the Fighters out there than yours. You can do much better. I'm sorry if I upset you but its true. Getting back to my problem. I don't necessarily need someone to rip the music for me per say but I do need someone to explain how to rip music from MAME roms and what program I need to convert them to MP3 or WAV format. Thanks for your time. -Glisp-
For one, you can just run Goldwave or any other audio software of your choice while you play, and record the song by setting your soundcard to record from something usually called "stereo mix" or "what you ear" or similar. If there are unavoidable sound effects, keep in mind that most games have a sound test accessible with F2. This is the lazy way, and work in most cases, though the quality you will get is questionable. So I discourage this solution. To get better quality, though it won't work with all games, you should download FoxM1, which is a standalone music player which includes a wav recorder. And when you have a wave, it's easy enough to convert it to mp3 :p
Thanks for the help man. If I need any further questions answered I know where to look now. Thanks again.
Unfortunately It doesn't support Metal Slug. I just want to say it is a nice little program but theres one minor problem: It doesn't seem to want to recognize Micheal Jackson's Moonwalker (Arcade version) even though it says it supports it. I've practically downloaded every Micheal Jackson's Moonwalker off various rom sites and it still won't recognize it. I got Altered Beast to work on it though. (I've been trying to get my hands on the Arcade version's music for some time now.)
It does for me, maybe it's because of a different ROM revision, I don't know. I uploaded my Metal Slug ROM on rapidshare for you, feel free to download it from here. By the way, for a vast majority of games, it only supports songs, and not sound effects.
I'm not interested in metal Slug. I was replying to Blast Processing. Sorry about the confusion. What about Micheal Jackson's Moonwalker though? The rom list says it is supported but it isn't recognized by the player when I try to load it. As I've mentioned though I've been to several Rom sites and haven't found one that the player notices yet.
It's because of the filename. Get this one and rename it to moonwalk.zip Then hit "rescan" or it won't be found.
It does play Neo Geo games, so there's no doubt that it'll play music and sfs from Metal Slug. But FoxM1 (Or M1 for that matter) hasn't been updated in a long time and most of the latest MAME rom sets don't support it. Unless someone pulls off a PSF version of the MAME sound driver, then arcade music will remain playing on the MAME emulator itself.
The best way but much harder would be disassembling the game in question, see where it writes to the memory addresses of the sound hardware, isolate the player code and make it standalone and make something like NSFs, but for that CPU/hw.
Why not a format like VGM, where it records what's being sent to the audio processor in question? Of course, you'd need to include every sound chip's emulator in a player, but I doubt there are TOO many different chips for something like that to be possible. Hehe.
Ah, the good old "emulated" versus "recorded" debat. I'm obviously in favor of emulated formats like SPC and GBS, even if they are harder to rip. Recorded formats like VGM are easier to make but they heavily rely on human skills to be trimmed and looped properly. To be fair, VGM was initially meant to be a multi-purpose format that could contain music for every known chip (hence the generic "Video Game Music" acronym), though they ended up supporting only the sound chips used in Sega consoles (SN76489, YM2413, YM2612, YM2151). Also note that adding support for a particular chip in the vgm format and in the vgm player isn't enough, as you also need an emulator able to record vgm files. There are plenty of arcade games that use the 2151, and some that use the 2612, but I've yet to see a MAME implementation with vgm output. Adding support for a chip in the vgm format requires a multi-person effort. Though it would be cool to have a multi-purpose VGM format so many different formats could be replayed with the same plugin.
I would LOVE to record Super Hang-On music into a VGM file. It sounds so much better in the arcade version than it does on Sega Genesis.
Man, NOW we're talking, SH-O has some very good songs. Its arcade version uses the YM2151, which is currently included in the VGM format: all you have to do is to edit Mame or another emulator making it able to write VGM files. And yeah, the song known as "Winning Run" is one of my all-time favourites. I'd like a 2151 VGM of it. Not that the 2612 version isn't good, but as you noticed too, the 2151 version is superior. edit: just found this old thread on smspower. Apparently I already asked that question (I'm Tom) 1¼ years ago. I don't know if the scenario changed during all this time. Also why do I have Winning Run looping in M1 since 15 minutes ago? <________< Saxman I hate you for reminding me how addicting that song is :P edit2: I checked out Winkawaks, apparently it's the only emulator out there that logs to CYM. The problem is that it only supports CPS1, CPS2, and neo-geo games (and 2151 logging is supported only for CPS1 anyway). This means that games such as Super Hang-On and Outrun aren't an option Also, it doesn't log the DAC channel. I think it would be a long way if someone wants to include VGM support in any arcade emulator. And yeah I still have Winning Run looping >_______>
I e-mailed the MAME team about two months ago asking if they were planning or would ever consider adding VGM support to MAME (because I was thinking about possibly adding YM2151 support to ProSonic and using it in place of YM2612 emulation altogether.) But as I figured, I got no response. That would be ideal for make music dumps for the chips supported by the VGM format. Also, as a kid playing Super Hang-On on my Sega Genesis, Hard Road was my favorite song, but now that I'm older now, I like Outride a Crisis better than anything else. Funny how tastes can change with time.
Considering their "we do it for the preservation" thing, they won't ever think in adding music logging. For that very same reason they removed the hi-score saving functionality (that saved hi-scores in games that normally would lose them when powered off). Also I suspect that for that very same reason they make many ROMs incompatible between versions complaining about missing files when the games worked perfectly >_>'
How about adding VGM logging to M1? Even as a private build if you're not going to perfect it (e.g. return an error message for non-2151 and non-2612 chips). I have no idea about how it works, but I guess that it has to decode the music in some way so maybe it's possible to use it to log to a VGM file. MAME team is full of faggots.
As I already mentioned in my previous post, MAME team is full of faggots. But there's an individual, ValleyBell, who is adding vgm logging to MAME, and he improved the VGM format to support a whole lot of new chips. Old players won't be able to replay the streams relevant to these new chips, but he also supplied a dedicated player. Look from here: http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=58831#58831.