Hey all, I was wondering if something that's happening when I play Secret of Mana on this emulator is a part of the game, or a glitch/problem that I could fix.
Whenever a sound plays (eg. attacking, getting hit, going up and down stairs, running fast) it will interrupt a part of the game's background music. I googled quite a bit and didn't see this mentioned anywhere, so I wasn't sure if it's a part of the game or not.
IIRC, this is normal behavior on the original cart.
This game was meant to be for the fabled "SNES CD", but that didn't happen. So what ended up happening (to get the game back into cart form during this process) was that a lot of the music+sounds clash, and they use some of the same sound channels.
Ah, ok thanks. It just gets to me when I'm trying to enjoy the boss music and due to the stupid AI of teammates they keep getting hit and I don't get to hear the music at all :/
It also lets you play .WAVs in a directory with the ROM, sorta like Sega CD dumps with separate ISO+WAVs. So if you converted the SPCs to WAVs.. or provided equivalent music, you could have it use those, and somehow hack the game to not play the music through the SPC.
The fake device also pretends to have the S-DSP's stereo cart mixer pins connected to it, allowing you to stream audio. So just leave the original S-SMP engine to only play sound effects, while the 21fx plays just the background audio. Do this by hooking the CPU-side calls to play BGM -- disable the S-SMP transfer and send a 21fx audio command instead.
While a ROM hacker could add this very easily, I don't think asking a casual user to learn the skill is going to be fruitful.
byuu wrote:The fake device also pretends to have the S-DSP's stereo cart mixer pins connected to it, allowing you to stream audio. So just leave the original S-SMP engine to only play sound effects, while the 21fx plays just the background audio.
The logical extension of that idea would be a "virtual device" that takes the SNES' video output and puts new graphics on top of it.
grinvader wrote:Using extra bankswitching for additional data is useless there. You want a software mixer ala ToP/SO.
I thought those used dynamic channel allocation, not software mixing. Also, there are several other games that use dynamic channel allocation, such as Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which uses the channels in a rotating cycle. And then there are several which use a different player, containing the notice "SLICK/Audio v1.01 Copyright(C)1994 Bitmasters,Inc.", such as Earthworm Jim, Mohawk & Headphone Jack... Earthworm Jim 2 also uses the same engine, but v1.07b according to the notice text. There are probably another handful of games that use this player, I don't have a GoodSNES / No-Intro / Whatever set handy to grep for the notice text. I think somebody else already did that for me a few years ago, but I've forgotten the majority of the games.
haha