Neo Geo Music Composing - Need Help

Lord_Tibor

FLIPTASTIC PRICEJACKER!
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Posts
411
Hi there, I just tried putting together some tracks with MVS Tracker form neobitz, but I found out the difficulty of making decent instruments when u think of percussions. The tracker itself has the option to save data in rom format, but surprisingly doesn't have the option to open roms files. If it opened them, it would be possible to read the instruments values for every neo geo game and it would help a lot the neo geo homebrew scene. No need to say i have a project in my mind and I would be the first of the line to appreciate your help ^^
From a logical point of view it shouldn't be too difficult to make the reverse action of a program possible...

Here is the link to the page:

http://www.neobitz.com/Pages/DevTools/MVSTracker.aspx
 

norton9478

So Many Posts
No Time
For Games.
20 Year Member
Joined
Oct 30, 2003
Posts
34,074
I didn't know that this existed...

Would be cool is somebody could do the music for the CD-Only games.
 

Lord_Tibor

FLIPTASTIC PRICEJACKER!
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Posts
411
The most important thing about this is getting the FM values for those cool sounds SNK got us used to... Because usually FM synths are actually pretty bad.
I'm designing a game, even if I'm not a programmer, just someone who always wanted to try the thing.
Music is part of the work I think I can do on my own right now, if my project gets bigger and I realize I can't finish it alone I'll surely try to put together a team. As soon as I'll have some artwork or graphics about the game, I'll post here for feedback.
Tyvm.

P.S. the game should be a totally new reinterpretation of the Old style action shooter (think of gunstar heroes).
 

JMKurtz

Tech Support Moderator,
20 Year Member
Joined
Aug 12, 2000
Posts
1,654
You would need to reverse engineer the sound driver logic in the M1 rom from a game to get the FM sound values, start/stop points for audio samples, and music sequences. Some games do share drivers so if you manage to decode a game in this fashion, you could at least decode a couple games. You'll need a very good understanding of Z80 assembly to go this route.

Or, there is an easier way to get the same info...

Take the MAME source code and modify the source to dump any values that are written to the audio chip emulator to a log file. You'll need a little understanding of that YM chip to make sense of the info, but it's not real difficult.

I did this back before we developed the basic MVS Tracker driver. I used this approach to find out where in the M1 of Puzzle de Pon the start/stop values were stored for the samples and then modifed the table to match my samples.

A lot of work, but possible.

Best of luck...

Jeff
 

Lord_Tibor

FLIPTASTIC PRICEJACKER!
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Posts
411
Ty very much for the info! Just one question more: on MVs Tracker with every note you have to fill 4 values: I easely got the first and second are octave and instrument number, what r those mysterious two?

note | octave | instrument | xx | xx

Thanks again, this was precious help ^^
 
Top