Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Audio Overload AO SDK release 1.0 available

Wha... I think it's valid? Both values on zero mean there's no difference to AICA 44100Hz clock. In other words, use 44100 as sample rate?
Now that you mention it... that AICA_Step sure looks odd. I'm going to sleep now, I'll look into it tommorow after work.

Yeah, I was actually wrong about that. The voice with OCT 0 FNS 0 does play fine.

Here's an interesting pickle for DSF: Mame Italia just sent in a dump of the Naomi game "Toy Fighter", and while the game itself doesn't run yet in MAME, the game's test menu does, including the sound test. After adjusting the AICA to address samples throughout 8 MB of RAM instead of 2 the tunes sound pretty good. So I'm willing to tweek the spec so there's 8 MB of RAM instead of 2. Highly Experimental won't like it, but I suspect Naomi may be a richer source of sequenced music than the DC anyway.

I've uploaded Sakura Taisen 1 & 2 DSF rips to my page along with a current version of dsfmake.

Does Toy Fighter use the Manatee driver or something else?

Virtua Fighter 3TB uses a non-manatee driver, and I haven't figured out how it works yet. Here's a pack of the driver w/ 2 sound files: http://h1.ripway.com/kingshriek/vf3tb.zip

It appears that 0x60-0x80 is used for SH4/ARM communication and that sound files are mapped at address 0x10000 from a look at the driver code.

I wouldn't count on it. The way I understand it Naomi has more memory only because it's unable to stream directly from GD-ROM. There's much less content on those GDs compared to DC ones.

Of course that could also mean the now missing movies and streams were replaced by sequenced music to fill the gap

kingshriek, there's another tough case I'd like you to take a look at. Soul Reaver has two sound drivers, one called MANATEE2 and one AUDIO64 (looks like MANATEE clone to me). No MLT files of any sort but when you throw out the movies, dialogues pack, graphics pack and binaries, there's still one big file left. Music has to be inside...
I may need to set up an FTP for that one though, as it would clobber your mail box otherwise. I'll let you know once it's ready.

http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/toyfighter.zip has an AICA RAM image while the song in the mp3 I posted is playing.

The driver IDs as "AM2/AICASoundDrv990421/Ver1.60" and "Sequencer 1.27 99/03/16 Y.Takeda" (ETA: which is basically the same driver as VF3TB). From a quick glance it looks like it's something of a midway point between the Saturn driver and Manatee, but that could be wrong. There are several blocks throughout RAM with the signature "DTPK" but none of the normal SMSB/SMPB manatee stuff.

Soul Reaver famously used interactive music, and thus I would presume it's going to be painful to rip (early attempts at various developed-by-Rare N64 games with interactive music usually resulted in all the possible tracks playing at once, which was not real listenable ;-)

New SDK: http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/aosdk_140a6.zip

- Cleaned up a few AICA bits (removed EGHOLD even though the bit where it would be is actually reserved ;-)
- Latest ARM7 improvements from Deunan
- Support for 8 MB of AICA RAM just in case (none of the existing rips seem to mind being in the larger RAM, fortunately)

Assuming Sakura Taisen 1 is supposed to sound like the Saturn SSF rip the DSP/dry mixing seems possibly a bit off (sakutai_11 is the same song on both rips and makes a handy comparison).

Unreal (the PC one, not the old Amiga game) had dynamic music as well (exploration/battle IIRC). All that amounted was some jump to pattern commands and a Scream/Impulse tracker module with two or three songs.

Skies of Arcadia has supposedly some dynamic music as well (boss battle tracks?), and I think kingshriek rip has all the music variations as a separate minidsf files, so hopefully Soul Reaver will be the same.

Some more aoDSF/HT comparisons here: www.snesmusic.org/hoot/log.txt
Might be a bit longwinded, but there's some good info there. This is all based on a5, BTW.

There are various interviews with Soul Reaver's composer (Kurt Harland) floating around where he claims their system was a lot more complex than simple channel mutes. Certainly nobody's successfully ripped the PS1 version yet and I would think that'd be a chip shot by comparison.

If memory serves me right SR had the ability to switch tunes without stopping the music as whole. Some instruments would simply expire and new ones would replace them. This wasn't always the case, but still... It's easy to reproduce in the very first tunnel once the intro sequence is over - the music changes as Raziel approaches the first teleport platform. I remember it well because due to a bug in my SH4 there was a time the game would freeze at this very moment.

As for the instruments being too short - I might have an idea. I'll get back to you soon

That log has all but put me off of further development of this code. I assume from the overall hostility to all things not Corlett that it's that "marioman" from HCS's forum?