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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYv2v_I3Tbw


Sorry for the double post, but I just wanted to show how close to the original I was able to make some of these tracks with a simple bit of splicing tracks together (to fit in the 8 track limit) and finding out that the FE7 drumset is waaaaay better than the midi default.

Hmm, that's odd that it sounded like that in Ruby. When I've imported to FE, the only instruments that have sounded off to me were the synth and drums. Maybe FE and GS's music engines are more similar than GS's and Ruby's.

As for the engine importing, yeah I have no idea where to start with that. Perhaps Atrius, Hextator, Nintenlord or Zahlman would know more about it. I'd assume it'd deal in ASM, though that's just a guess. I don't really know anything on how the music engines work.


And no problem, I'll continue to experiment around and reasearch some of this stuff and if I come up with anything worth noting I'll report it to ya. Music is something I'll never be able to let go, so I enjoy this type of hacking.

Ah, so you're using the original GS instruments in combination with new ones?

Yeah, almost every FE hacker I know has expanded his or her ROM to the 32 MB format, so that's no problem. We generally place the original midi patch around the address 0x91F0000ish.

One of Zahlman's existing utilities has the ability to rip simple instruments already, though he's working on the feature to port mutliple sample instruments (like drumkits) for his newer app I believe. I manged to port GS's drumkit manually (using Atrius's audio ripper as an example to see if I did it right) and that leads me to a question:

I remember you saying at one point or another that GS's synth instruments are pretty much generated by GS's modified music engine. Now I know the drums are not generated per se by this engine, but does the engine have some sort of impact on the drum kit? Usually when I port instruments (minus the synth) from GS to other games, the instrument's original tuning/other properties stay intact. Yet when I did the same with the drums, they sounded way too staccato and lacked definition. They sounded bad enough for me to want to scrap those hours worth of manual porting to go with the midi kit.

But yeah, if this patch is specifically tailored to GS (to include its original instruments in the voice groups as well) then we could probably add whatever is necessary to make up for that in time. If we have to use the midi synth, then I guess it won't be too bad, it's stuff like the midi brass (which is IMO really bad sounding) that I'm worried about.


Anyways, this is all pretty much speculation at this point, I'm just putting this on the table to get something initiated, as I know several people who are looking to put quality instruments in their hack.


I'm glad to say your tutorials have taught me quite a lot about the format GBA uses for its music. I've done quite a bit of experimentation since I started this.

Most impressive. Maybe I was mistaken, but did I read somewhere you're making a full instrument kit?

Right now I don't have access to the resources to test the patch myself (away from my usual computer) but what offset is the patch applied at...or rather, what is the offset range of the voice data and wav samples?

The reason I ask is because the hacker I mentioned earlier in that thread I made (which I might add, my game's sound track is quickly becoming a hybridized version of GS and FE, with improvements on the instruments over what I had on YT), Zahlman, is making an app for ROM hacking in general, and it will potentially (he's trying to make this happen at least) have the ability to apply an instrument patch at any offset specified. Now, right now we have the midi instruments that Blazer ripped from song.gba in mid2gba. Those are nice, but it's looking like once you're finished making this patch,  your instruments will dwarf the one's we're using in terms of quality.

I gotta ask, for comparitive reasons, how data intensive do you expect this patch to be? For all 128 instruments, the midi patch was about 1.2-1.3 MB altogether.

With your permission, and of course giving you full credit at every turn, (and like I said, once you've finished) I'd like to relay this to Zahlman to make a universally applicable instrument patch that could be applied to just about any GBA game as long as the free space permits.

I'm thinking this could easily set a new standard.

Hahaha! Awesome to see ya here too.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIJW-pK3VFE

So apparently it is possible to do this with a little magic (and an apparently undeletable beep...).

I really need to learn more about music hacking and data structures. I'm a computer engineering major but have not progressed that far in my major (just switched to it last semester) so this knowledge definitely wouldn't be pointless to me.


EDIT: SUCCESS! I had to repoint some instruments for the ones that were incompatible, but these turned out alright. Only the Saturos battle lost some data because of the amount of tracks (half of them were just echoes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IO154H3cNM   Karst & Agatio battle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du6PzNlej7Y    Colosso Battle Theme
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tObZ1T3n5n8    Saturos Battle Theme

Oh sorry for not being clear.


The method I was using was Zahlman's GBA song editor for the transfer, which takes the instruments necessary, and transfers them along with the song data. So the data had a consistent BD 01, BD 02, BD 03, etc per different track going since the instrument list is tailored to it.

I tried using FE instruments but they sounded worse than the midi for this purpose.

So I tried the first one again, and this time it was successful, but I got this:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyfJhTMZp1M


It would seem that once again the percussion is not compatible with FE, and whatever weird synth instrument (that's noticeably missing from the beginning and the 5/8 bars) it has is not compatible as well. Also the song has 10 tracks, 9 of which were transferred. FE has an 8 track limited so I moved 9 on to 8 after recording that video, and it turned out it was just an echo effect for the oboe melody.

Here's the data that was transferred:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20463170/gssaturosbattransferdata

I was wondering, is there any way to repoint the percussion and synth instrument to another instrument set while keep the others pointed to the current ones? I have a working version of percussion and that synth instrument I can use.

Tested the direct import method with 2 tracks.

Try one: Saturos battle theme (1 instrument unsupported)

Nothing. Completely blank, no sound. (Disappointing to me, Saturos battle theme was my fave, and the midi version came out "meh" at best upon importation).

Try two: Colosso battle theme (1 instrument unsupported)

Perfect transfer, minus percussion (D:) which is vital. (the midi version for this one actually wasn't too bad, original is still better but the midi actually comes close)


Bah. This leaves me undecided. The Saturos battle theme was a big one. Ugh.


Did I get the value for the song right though? The list I referenced said it was this:

0x02ef Saturos Battle!

But the list jumped around a lot (and randomly went up and down 0x100 or so, so I don't know how trustworthy it is).

Actually, on second thought, I just want to start out by trying to transfer the songs directly and see what kind of results I get.

If you guys have them, could I possibly get the offset of the array that contains all the pointers to the various songs in the game as well as a list of the values of the songs? If I have those I can calculate the location of the pointer to the header of the song desired and I can try this direct transfer with a few songs.

Well, there's my handy dandy GBA audio data ripper which can rip ALL of the audio data from most GBA games, or append it to the end of another file.  I've been meaning to upgrade it so it can insert it anywhere in another file, but never really got around to it.  Anyway, it just transfers all of the audio data, adjusting pointers accordingly, you'd still have to go into FE's audio data, and repoint some of it's audio slots to the newly inserted audio instead.

Meaning simply the song array the points to song headers correct? Or will I have to alter some pointers in the ASM code of the game? Either way, that's a very handy little tool you made there.

How big is the GS instrument map data wise?

Instrument data alone... I'm not 100% sure, but ALL of the audio data combined is 1,403Kb.

That's...not too bad. I had 17 MB available in the beginning, am about halfway through the event programming of my ROM hack and have only used about 2 out of those 17 (and about 1.3 MB of that was used for MIDI conversion instrument maps...so really song and instrument data is gonna be my biggest filler here).

Is there restrictions that FE has (eg no. of instruments allowed) that GS doesn't have/is more lenient on? (or more rather, does GS have an 8 track limit as well?)

I do recall hitting that limit at one point, I don't remember exactly what it was though...  I know it does have some synthesized instrument types that many other GBA games don't support though.

Hmm, that's....troubling but maybe it isn't so bad.

If this is plausible, exactly how much about music data am I going to need to know to pull this off? Is it all documented or are there certain techniques I need to explore? Or would it really just come down to copying and pasting the instrument and repointing every pointer with a calculator? (tedious I know, but I'm willing to do it)

Well, my tool could definitely make things easier.  Charon also wrote a guide on the format at the bottom of the first post in this topic.

I'll get to reading that guide.

On the limit... I've fit 13 tracks into one song at once with at least 7-8 playing without cancellation. If you want I'll preform a test (after work today) to see what it really is...

I've heard Blazer was able to locate the actual programming for the sound data so if you could repoint all that data, you could in theory get the exact sound as Golden Sun gets.

Hmmm...13...that's quite a bit better than FE does. Yeah, exact sound is what I'm going for but I'm pretty unfamiliar with sound data formats so I might come to you two for questions if that's ok.

Hello GS hackers,

I'm a huge fan of Golden Sun music and have always wanted to transfer a lot of it to my FE ROM hack. What I have tried so far is MIDIs, but those really don't do the songs from GS justice, as they're different instruments that just don't produce the same quality of sound that was strived for and achieved by GS instruments.

Now, using Zahlman's song editor (an editor made for transferring songs from one ROM to another), I could transfer the songs one by one (if I knew the offsets of their headers) but to me, it seems like a highly inefficient method. From what I can gather (I really don't know the specifics) the song editor takes the instruments necessary for a ripped song and transfers them. That would cause a lot of redundant data if songs were transferred in mass.

What I ideally want to do is transfer all the GS instrument data necessary from here to my FE rom via...more or less...copy paste methods, then transfer whatever songs I need via the same method and enjoy them in lossless quality.

I have some questions. Is the knowledge of GS song data here sufficient to do this?
How big is the GS instrument map data wise?
Is there restrictions that FE has (eg no. of instruments allowed) that GS doesn't have/is more lenient on? (or more rather, does GS have an 8 track limit as well?)
If this is plausible, exactly how much about music data am I going to need to know to pull this off? Is it all documented or are there certain techniques I need to explore? Or would it really just come down to copying and pasting the instrument and repointing every pointer with a calculator? (tedious I know, but I'm willing to do it)

I apologize if that is a lot of questions. I just think it would be cool to be the first person in FE hacking to have ported over the entire instrument map from GS, a game I nostalgically love.

Thanks for any feedback,

Mariobro3828

EDIT: I do apologize if this is in the wrong section, I think I may have jumped the gun when posting, this probably belongs in general hacking right?


I was originally going to send this as a PM to Charon the Ferryman (I know she's rather knowledgeable of this kind of thing), but the validation images seem to be buggy.