While you're waiting for the Hacking Contest, you might be interested in looking at something interesting. And maybe this could be the source of my hack "Sonic 1 FM", which upgrades the Master System version of Sonic The Hedgehog to use the YM2413 OPLL FM chip. (If you don't know what this is about, you should check out its entry page at the SHC2014. Please note that the version there is outdated and the most recent build is v1.02.) It includes everything I used to make Sonic 1 FM. That means MIDIs, VGMs, custom tools and of course the full source code for the hack, including various revisions of the modified sound driver. There is also a readme file with the story about its development. So if you're interested, you can download the Sonic 1 FM source here. Enjoy! P.S.: How many Sonic hacks had an official source code release until now? EDIT: Added link to SHC2014 entry page. EDIT2: Added note about outdated link on SHC page.
I believe I speak for everyone at this point when I say that ValleyBell understands the technology that makes SEGA consoles bleep and boop better than even some contemporary SEGA sound employees. Very, VERY nicely done.
Any chance you can show a before and after of what it does? I'm curious, but not very knowledgeable about this.
Well, in short, as I understand it, in addition to the PSG chip on the SEGA Master System worldwide, the Japanese version also had an FM-chip (above-mentioned YM2413), though it was only supported by a few games. Emulators know about this of course, if well-programmed; this modification allows the game to make full use of the FM-chip, from what I can tell. Just contrasting with memory alone is a very decent improvement (it certainly helps that a huge number of extra channels is now available, I suppose :P ) So to get to the actual point of this sleep-deprived post, a small comparison of what I just recorded VS the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7eAbqRTK6Q vs https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59506771/misc/S1SMSFMBoss.mp3
The easiest way of comparing before and after would be to compare a longplay of the original version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWkljXOgV1U with one of the hack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WRwpcV9_30
