Generic Driver Test by hcs at 10:25 PM EDT on May 27, 2005
I've built a generic audio lib driver from the PlaySeq demo, and I'll be trying it with games more likely to work soon, but the first game I tested was Jet Force Gemini. It sounds like they've modified things a bit on their end... but could someone more familiar with the music give their opinion on this?
I then proceeded to rip a sample from Body Harvest, again I ask someone familiar with the music to let me know how good this sounds. It seems to have come out better for me. I'm using the .ctl, .tab, and .seq from Body Harvest, everything else is the devkit example player. What worries me is that there's a lot of configuration, even certain effects, that might not be included. I'll try a few more things before I go through with this set, but here's an example for now.
For the record the JFG came from data Destop had collected... and my initial check of JFG seemed to indicate a very loose usage of the audio library functions. Body Harvest is much less, er, creatively programmed.
I've found that Body Harvest doesn't use any custom parameters for AlSeqpConfig (which would be stuff like functions for effects) but it does use a custom reverb effect for AlSynConfig (previously I was using the "small room" model). I copied that table into PlaySeq and here's what I have:
Thank God... I finally got this last friggin' annoying bug out of the way, there was a click at the beginning of some tracks, now a few frames of silence pass before the sequence player starts and that seems to have fixed things. I'm also nearly done with a .ctl/.tbl ripper, which I used in Body Harvest to isolate things used in bank 1 (instruments for the sequencer, bank 0 was sound effects) which brought the .tbl size down significantly (by more than half). The .ctl processing is apparently missing something so I had to use all of that, but it's 50k total so no big loss. I'm uploading the set now as a prelim.
Once again, please, people familiar with Body Harvest tell me how this sounds.I don't think there's anything else that needs to be done with this set but tagging.
Oh, and, er, bh57.miniusf is in there by mistake. It's just silence.
This driver should pave the way for "easy" ripping for many games.
Heh, since you said easy in quotations, I think the question that follows is "what do you mean by easy?" I mean, ripping MIDIs from games with the smashy driver (and other drivers? O.o) is like a walk in the park using VGMTrans - would the process be anything like that? I never imagined it would be somehow but I thought I'd ask.
Well, it means that if something uses the audio library I can locate the .seq, .ctl and .tbl, any parameters used for the synthesizer, and just plug them into the driver. At least that's the theory...
I'm taking a look at Forsaken now, it's all straight from the official libraries.
I figure it could in fact be automated, add a scanner for library functions into an emulator (HLE emus do that already), trap the parameters to the initialization functions, BAM!
Oh yays, we are on the way to making a craptapper for usf!
Body Harvest by Gema at 7:34 PM EDT on May 29, 2005
Thanks for Body Harvest Hcs!
However i dont think its ready yet for tagging, some tracks have errors, like missing instuments - bh1f is one fine example - you can realy tell that something is wrong without having played the game...
Some other tracks have similar problems but less noticeable... i dont know how you can be sure when a track is good if you havent played the game hcs...
if you want i can point to you the problematic tracks, i will test them later when i finish my job