Super Metroid MSU-1: Need all fan-made music for release

uh, that Music makes my flesh creep... awesome Job DS

DarkShock wrote:In other news, the hack is now finally available in IPS format with a music pack from Blake Robinson's Super Metroid Symphony

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2393/

Absolutely fantastic! I just tried it on my SD2SNES it sounds amazing oh my god I love it lol Great work man.

I did my own playthrough of the hack (in 3 parts):





Yeah I know I lost so many times in Ridley's Lair, I forgot the path

Good DarkShock

Amazing

Patch not working under Higan 1.04, I'm using the volume corrected .pcm-Files that qwertymondo created, and Higan still doesn't respond and start properly the ROM.

Patch not working under Higan 1.04

Logical, since Higan is the worst emulator ever created. But if you do everything right, it should be working, it's just a complex process to set MSU on this emu.

I briefly checked Dark Shock's bml and noticed 2 mistakes:

1. Higan imports the name as program rom, so I changed
rom name=supermetroid_msu1.sfc size=0x300000-> rom name=program.rom size=0x300000

(dunno how you get it work in previous higan versions with that wrong rom name)

2. Byuu is known for changing policies like the weather. In higan 1.0 he changed the format a rom must be registered in the manifest, this involves e.g.,
cartridge region=NTSC -> board region=NTSC
otherwise it will not work on the other version.

Luckily, there is a trick: if you register both (cartridge and board) in the manifest, means make a double entry, so each msu track is also listed twice and so on, it will work on both higan policies.

I rewrote the manifest in this way, so it should now work in your higan 1.4

I used this trick on all msu projects I am the author, I do not know however if DS will do the same, and updates his files.

Another option that will work for every version of higan is to rename your audio files track-1.pcm, track-2.pcm, etc. then rename the .msu file to msu1.rom and then delete the manifest file. The reason they are named the way they are is to make it easier to use on the SD2SNES. Also, it's v104, not 1.4. There was never a "1.0" and v100 wasn't anything special, it's just a continuous, sequential version number that increments by 1 every release.

Okay, thanks, I try it out. Must I rename the .pcm-Files to match it with the ROM or can I let them in the way like I downloaded them?

Okay, thanks, I try it out. Must I rename the .pcm-Files to match it with the ROM or can I let them in the way like I downloaded them?

Qwerty was quite clear in his instructions, where he said

rename your audio files track-1.pcm, track-2.pcm, etc

But you can also just try the manifest.bml I attached to my post above

I've added my new Metroid Metal audio pack to the database. For now, all I have is the .msu1 bundle. Load it directly in Snes9x or export it using Mercurial Magic (which, come to think of it, I should add to the Tools board).

Awesome
btw I really love snes9x 1.55 for making it so simple to play msu1. Neither xml nor bml are needed. I am right now undecided whether I will further support my hacks with those bml/xml since I still do not know a good way to create them, and I guess the user-friendly snes9x 1.55 is the future in msu1 playing once it is released ofiicially
However, I still want to supply xml/bml somehow... do you know a good trick to create these files? How do you get the correct values?

Honestly, my suggestion would be to switch to the .msu1 pack format for your uploads.  Then you don't need any manifests at all because Mercurial Magic can generate them for you!  Or even better, Snes9x can load the pack directly without any need for the end user to extract anything, they can just drop game.sfc and game.msu1 into a folder and run the ROM.  No mess, no fuss, only 1 file instead of 50 cluttering up their directory.  And on your end, it's just a .zip file, so it's really easy to create.

The one thing that isn't currently supported by Mercurial Magic is the xml manifests for bsnes (it only generates higan manifests, but it can create both the older and newer style ones).  However, this actually might not be a huge problem because Revenant was able to make bsnes-plus work with MSU-1 games without any manifests at all!  And it was only 6 lines of code.  So, rather than supporting the really old xml manifests, it would be better to put some pressure on any other actively-maintained bsnes forks to add those lines of code and then we can simply have one less format to deal with.  And without the manifests, bsnes would work with exactly the same file names as SD2SNES/Snes9x.  I'll probably need to write up some more details in the MM thread I created in the tools board, but I honestly think that's probably the easiest solution for everybody at this point (and it really is easy).

You really have some good suggestions here and I hope the next bsnes+ version will have these 6 loc:s. Always wondered why it is necessary to add the xml/bml only to activate registers 2000-2007; which aren't used by snes anyways.

Providing it the way you suggest really should have some advantages, I should start going with time and e.g., switch to the safer bps format (which prevents patching the wrong headered/nation roms)... but for now I think I'll go with the usual way I provide the files. But it is interesting that Mercurial Magic generates the bml. I must admit I never checked it out  can you give a short instruction how I do it? Once I have the bml, the steps to make it a xml are easy then

Short version, you need the following files (named exactly like so):

-patch.bps *OR* program.rom (for instance, Super Road Blaster, or possibly BS-Zelda since you're already hosting those ROMs you could include the pre-patched ROM in the file)

-msu1.rom (can be a 0-byte file if there is no video/data ROM)

-track-#.pcm

Compress these files into a standard .zip file (deflate only) and rename the extension to .msu1. Done!

To use, download and run Mercurial Magic, it will ask you for the .msu1 file and the ROM file (if the .msu1 pack contains a patch instead of a full ROM), and you will select your output format. Click OK and you're done. Or, with the latest Snes9x builds (within the last 2 weeks or so, you can grab them here the 64-bit build is a bit unstable and randomly refuses to open sometimes for some reason...), just take your ROM and .msu1 file and rename them to match (e.g. game.sfc/game.msu1) and put them in the same directory, then load the game. I've also requested that byuu add support for this kind of loading into higan, so we'll see what he thinks: https://board.byuu.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1797

Thanks a lot! I will try it out as soon I get some time for it. Currently I am doing the new bszelda pcm:s (map1&2 already finished and uploaded, I hope I will have time tomorrow for AST. I have 2 mirrors, each file 2 GB, that's a lot files to replace, hopefully this is the last time). I will announce when I am done.

Then I will try it on DKC and SOE whether I get a bml with MM

I do not like to hijack DS' thread but... works like a charm, thanks so much Qwerty I was able to create the bml for DKC in 10 minutes, and just took the values from there in a xml template. This eases the pain with the xml/bml a lot!

Yeah, the idea with the manifests was that you were never supposed to have to create them by hand, byuu has tools that do that automatically. The only reason we ever had to do it manually was because we didn't use his naming convention (program.rom, msu1.rom, track-#.pcm). MM just uses byuu's tools to do that for you. And my actual original idea wasn't that YOU would use MM to create those files, rather you would upload the.msu1 pack and the end user could use MM to create them after they download it. But what you did works too,I guess. The other option would have been to run the game normally in higan and then just open the manifest viewer from the menu, it would've shown it to you there.

And my actual original idea wasn't that YOU would use MM to create those files, rather you would upload the.msu1 pack and the end user could use MM to create them after they download it. But what you did works too,I guess.

*lol yes, works like a charm! guess I really need to update my way to provide msu1-files one day.
Only thing I noticed was that I manually had to include track numbers in the created manifest like:
track number=1 name=dkc_msu-1.pcm
but this wasn't a problem Just wondering whether this should be done automatically, too as, we almost always provide the tracks in the format gameName-x.pcm (since this is the format used by both, bsnes and snes9x 1.55).