SpritesMind.Net

Hello my fellows dev,

i've released the rom of my port of rick dangerous. Head to www.pascalorama.com to download

cheers

pascal

Cool.

Two things I didn't liked, though: controls aren't changed to ones you'd expect from a console game (jump by button, shot by other button, etc); and music pieces as samples. You could rip the original PSG music and replay it through SMD's PSG (or FM synth, if you want) rather easily - the sound would be better and the size would be smaller.

Shiru wrote:Cool.

Two things I didn't liked, though: controls aren't changed to ones you'd expect from a console game (jump by button, shot by other button, etc); and music pieces as samples. You could rip the original PSG music and replay it through SMD's PSG (or FM synth, if you want) rather easily - the sound would be better and the size would be smaller.

thanks shiru. I know pcm sound is really lame :p but i'm a crap at sound programming. The original music are made on Atari ST, how can i rip for the sn psg ?

For the controls, i left the original scheme, i'll make a more genesis scheme later

ah ah!
It seems you were right : first comment is about FX

anyway, thanks a lot for the release!!!

KanedaFr wrote:ah ah!
It seems you were right : first comment is about FX

anyway, thanks a lot for the release!!!

told you !!! anyway that's a step in a project started in 2005 ^^

How to rip AY music for Sega's PSG.

You need an emulator that capable to record sound registers dump. I'm not sure about ST emulators, but even if there is no such an emulator, there are options: either add PSG log in some open source emulator (easy, just few lines of code), or use other version of the game, for example ZX Spectrum one - as far as I remember, it has the same music, and there are emulators with AY log feature for sure. Even better, there is music rip from ZX Spectrum Rick Dangerous, and a converter that gives you needed data in very simple format in just few clicks, so no programming required for this stage at all.

Once you got AY registers dump, you need to make simple tool that converts it to Sega's PSG. You can't convert complex AY music, because AY is more complex than PSG, but Rick Dangerous has really simple music, which could be converted easily. You just need to parse the original dump, got frequency dividers and volumes, recalc them into Sega's values (AY has 12-bit dividers, the PSG has 10-bit, and their clock frequency is different). Record the result into some simple format, even VGM (unzipped) will work fine. Data without any compression will be large, but it just tens of KB for all the music.

Music player on SMD side will only take bytes and send them to the PSG, nothing more.

If you want FM music autoconverted from the original AY music, it going to be more complex, because you also need to make some instruments, and combine the music player with samples player.


Well, if you still think it is difficult, but you don't mind to update the game, I could do the work for you, so you'll only need to put it into the game.

thanks Shiru , that's way too complicated for me , i don't get anything about sound programming :p

I'm trying to get the music redone. My problem is for the sfx , do you think it's possible to redo the sfx with the psg ?

No problem with redo the sfx too. Of course it is only for those effects which are PSG-like - not much sense to redo digitized sounds like a scream or a shot.

Actually I've done that for Uwol - ripped AY sound effects from the original, converted them to VGM, edited with Mod2PSG2, converted to special format and played with my code which allows to play few multichannel effects at once.

Pascal, thank you so much for your excellent work!
I'm amazed

That's a fantastic port! Congratulations!