SNEs SPCs or SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive VGMS

Talk about anything and everything about Sega's 16 Bit console and its addons here - hardware, games, memories. You name it.

What shall I do?

Poll ended at Tue Apr 05, 2011 12:32 am

Continue hacking SNES games for SPCs
1
11%
Start hacking Geneis games for VGMS
8
89%
 
Total votes: 9

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nensondubois
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Post by nensondubois »

Well, I'd be interested in true music modifiers as I hack for in Super Nintendo games, not RAM non-bank modifiers. Guess I'll have to wait until a good debugger becomes available, but I'll at least have these few sets finished in about two weeks.
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Dark Pulse
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Post by Dark Pulse »

Super Nintendo's a bit different since its music side is more or less separated, whereas on the Genesis it's a fair bit different. The music program on a SNES is pretty much easily isolated.

I do know that what I did for some sets was simply open a savestate, adjust the value at a certain address, save the state and then reload it in the emulator, but obviously, this depends heavily on the sound engine used. Elegant, no, but it works and that's all that ultimately matters.
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ValleyBell
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Post by ValleyBell »

Look at this list: http://www.smspower.org/Development/MemoryHacks
I know it's all Master System games, but MegaDrive games also work with this way.
Sometimes you can simply change some byte and the music starts to play and sometimes you need to call some function to start the music (I read that Super Mario 1998 needs that).
Swapping pointers also works quite often and replacing some sound data does the rest.

I guess SNES hacking is harder, because there's a lot more to load. (samples for each instrument)
Most MegaDrive games use one instrument lib for all songs and one list for its DAC sounds (at least the Sonic games do) so it's easier to hack them.
KungFuFurby
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Post by KungFuFurby »

On my end, the SNES music is usually easy to dump, although you need some good timing (all I have to do is push a button using an emulator), but you may need an IPS patch if the SPC is first-note sticking, or you might not be able to rip the music at all in SPC format (Lost Vikings is a good example of a game you cannot rip in SPC format...).

However, I've never tried to invent a music modifier for a Genesis/Megadrive game... and on my end, I have the wrong Mac to even attempt ripping Genesis/Megadrive music (I believe I need an Intel Mac at the very least, and I have an iMac G5)...

I'm the type of guy that likes to wing it on music modifiers... I don't have a single debugger to work with because of the type of computer I'm on. I'm usually pretty serious on composer info... if there's a composer that I can find, I grab it.

On the SNES, usually the toughest type of music modifiers that I have encountered are pointer-based, and I run into these when trying for something not pointer-based. For example: Super Honmei: GI Seiha for the SFC has this type of a music modifier. Usually when I get these type of stuff, you have to find a list in the ROM so you can play all of the tunes.
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