Something you should report to Ikari if older firmware versions work with your controller/receiver. Hapy it is solved

Just in case a skilled rom hacker wants to help fix an issue where the sound effects play faster than they should with this MSU hack (most noticeable when switching Kongs), here is some information from Conn who was unable to figure out a solution: "Yes, won't work, the hardcore apu mute was the only way I managed to get a clear spc mute. Maybe another hacker finds a better solution one day. This mute leads to the apu less busy resulting that sfx are played faster. Most people don't find that annoying, just unused. Myself, as said, find it even better. But I also understand that you want the original for your restoration project, but... unfortunately, I can't help "

Just out of curiosity, is anyone else excited for all the new Donkey Kong Country love being represented in smash bro Ultimate? I love the King K Rool Theme in his release trailer. Im going to do some new PCM tracks for this game this winter when the game comes out and I have full access to the soundtracks in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Jicw_RWNI

Cool we only have 9 packs by now, one further surely is necessary Though I admit, sounds awesome!

I probably wont do an entire album, just a few fun new tracks to swap if someone wanted to.

Conn, I just wanted to let you know that I ended up using this method of SPC muting in Chrono Trigger, which I hadn't even considered before, so thank you for posting this.  It made the Chrono Trigger code SO much cleaner and less bug-prone.  I was able to make 3 fairly major improvements to the overall method though, so I thought I'd provide feedback in case it might be useful to you.

First of all, the code I overwrote changed the data access and not the execution path, so no timings were modified.

e.g.
lda {VOLUME_VARIABLE}
sta {VOLUME_REGISTER}

was changed to

lda #$00
sta {VOLUME_REGISTER}

Second, thanks to the wonderful disassembly from MathOnNapkins, I was able to decipher the data upload routines used to load new songs into the SPC.  I used these routines to upload my simple code hijack, which then allowed me to mute and unmute at will, by uploading either my muted version or the original code.

Third, the data upload routines were hard-coded to only allow uploads with a target address within the intended song data address range, so I had to modify those hard-coded ranges in order to allow me to upload data to the code range.  This part was specific to Chrono Trigger, but should be directly applicable to any SquareSoft game, and might be similarly implemented in other engines, so I figured it was worth mentioning.

Unfortunately, my ability to do this relied quite heavily on all of the fantastic disassembly work that MathOnNapkins had already done for Chrono Trigger's SPC engine, so it may prove to be far more work than it is worth to try going down that road from scratch.

Conn, I just wanted to let you know that I ended up using this method of SPC muting in Chrono Trigger,

Sounds great! But which method did you use?

Are you making progress in the video and such?

I meant the method of muting the SPC by actually modifying the code running on the SPC itself, rather than doing it entirely on the SNES CPU side. That was something I hadn't even considered trying on my previous hacks.

Still working on the video, little by little.

Did you find any volume registers in the spc? I remember I searched hard for them... I usually mute the spc by nopping out code there.

Yes there are multiple volume registers (actually in the DSP, so it's tricky to trace writes to them). There's a master volume, and a per-channel volume. You need to trace the per-channel ones, otherwise you'll mute the SFX along with the music. In Chrono Trigger, I was able to trace out the variable in RAM where they were storing the volume for the current song (there were actually 4 of them), and then the code went something like this:

Code:


for(i=0; i<8; ++i) {
if channel(1<<i) & music_channel // this channel is playing music, not SFX

channel_volume_reg[i] = song_volume * song_fade * channel_volume[i] * channel_volume[i];
}

I just replaced the song_volume value with a constant 0 (lda song_volume -> lda #$00), and then everything after was multiplied by 0, giving an end result of 0. Granted, this solution was specific to this engine, but there's probably something similar for other engines.

Last edited by qwertymodo on Sun 30 Sep 2018 - 19:33; edited 1 time in total

Oh wow, amazing. If you one time have the time/energy/will you may want to look into DKC (the patch of this topic) if you can find anything similar. Myy patch leads to sfx acceleration, with which some people are unhappy and disturbed (though I have no problem with it).

Donkey Kong Country

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ltcf-5lyBjohYmQ9eE4GAwnukZxmAKQW

The highlight of these tracks is I took the new Smash Ultimate "Gangplank Galleon" remix (the final boss fight theme). It starts with a more traditional sounding Gangplank Galleon but then switches over to the upbeat Smash Bros Ultimate version. I feel like it was more natural and smooth that way and fun to listen to.

Please add this to the original post, THANK YOU!!!

Merry Christmas!!!

added to end of first post... thank you. Maybe you can post sort of a cover art like the other packs too, so it draws more attention?

Is it just me, or is there no track number for the Game Over track?

I'm until January 4th on vacation with just my mobile and no computer with me, so I can't check.
I'd guess all themes are mapped and the game over is a sfx like theme. I hope you can hear the sfx music in the game over screen with msu patch applied? If there's mute I could adjust the patch to play an extra theme here, if the original sfx is played here, then leave it.... it'd be too much issue to add such a theme to all of the dozen sets we have.

Is it just me, or is there no track number for the Game Over track?

Phew, you almost scared me. I checked, the game over is theme
16: K. Rool's Cacophony

For some reason I thought K. Rool's Cacophony was a completely different theme, but you're right. Good catch.

I've started work on more in-depth disassembly of the SPC engine to try and get fallback working, and so far I've come up with this code which mutes the music without speeding up the SFX like the current code.

Code:

ROM offset 0x0AAFB9
$E8 $02 $00 $D4 $4C E8 $00 $00

Edit: Hmm... ok, that didn't actually help, it's still cutting off early. Back to the debugger I go.

Hey Conn, so this picture that Polargames did for my DKC-PCM set is pretty awesome, lets use this one. You can find it here.
https://www.zeldix.net/t1849-snes9x-trouble

Done, thanks

Thanks Conn, i appreciate your constant work to update and run this website. If its ok to fix, my name actually has a typo of Jug6ment and is missing a letter, if you could change that to JUD6MENT that would be great (i kinda like all caps too). I would hate being obnoxious and nit picky, but i would appreciate it, thank you.

Oh my... sorry

Thanks Conn!

I'm not sure how to convert music to PCM format, but I have a suggestion for a music pack. A guy on YouTube named Sam Miller is recreating music from the Donkey Kong Country games by disassembling the music, tracking down the original uncompressed sound samples that David Wise used, and recreating the tracks in much higher quality. They really sound amazing—you can listen to one example here (follow the video back to YouTube and check the description to download the track):



I'd like to create a music pack using the tracks Sam Miller has restored. (I'd probably use the official CD soundtrack for the tracks that haven't been restored, and then add in more restored tracks as Sam Miller releases them.)

Such a project was aimed (dunno Sam miller or something else),
https://www.zeldix.net/t1476p75-donkey-kong-country-1-finished

by VideogameScrapbook
@Conn, would anybody who created any of the DKC series PCM tracks be willing to create a pack using BlueTronic's restoration of the original uncompressed samples? The casual listener may not notice right away the quality difference, but any big fan of the original game soundtracks will be blown away by the quality upgrade:
http://www.dkc-atlas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=2230