Hey everyone! Back in the day it seemed there used to be a lot more support for Band Brothers. I remember there was a whole community that were uploading songs and putting them online so others could play. Is there anyone who still plays this series?

The 3DS version is really amazing. The problem is that the game only gives you four songs to play and the rest need to be downloaded from Nintendo's servers. I tried this game out on my Gateway and I am considering importing it. The game requires you to be online, which is possible with .3dz files, however the game has a 1.3 update that needs to be downloaded from the eShop in order to connect. Even if I import the game, will I be able to get that update file and be able to download new songs?

The game uses a currency of tomatoes in order to get new songs. When you buy the game you get a code that gives you 100 free tomatoes. It's pretty bizarre.

Nintendo's Japanese site for the game has a list of the songs that can be downloaded. Some of them sound like they'd be really fun to play. Many of them come from other video game series as well.

Is there anyone else out there who still plays the game? What are your thoughts on the new 3DS version? What songs do you think would be fun to play?

EDIT: Here are a couple gaming songs that I quickly found:
F-Zero
Super Mario Bros
My Neighbor Totoro
New Super Mario Bros Wii BGM
Kokiri Forest

And for those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a rhythm game that has songs divided into different instruments. Here's a gameplay video:

 

sadly there is no way to play it :C i love the game as well, but unless you have a jap3ds the game cannot be updated. hopefully in a distant future the scene will give us the ability to update games from crossed regions

 

Sounds inferior to the DS version to me.

 

There was a huge 2.0 update that adds a lot of stuff, and changes a lot of other things. It has changed about as one can change a game before it becomes its own sequel. On the bright side, hopefully there might be a new 2.0 dump at some point considering how much is different. Would help you flashcart users get with it a little. If anyone has a Japanese 3DS, I have some codes for a demo for the game as well to get from the eShop.

 

You'll be missing most of the game. You can't obtain additional songs, or play online, without having the latest version. It's best to think of this game as a rhythm game SERVICE due to its frequent updates and ever changing library and features.

 

On the plus side, people who own the game can give out codes that you can redeem on a Japanese 3DS for a free to play version of the game. Serves as a demo, but you can also buy additional songs if you'd like, or play online or local multiplayer without spending a single yen. You don't get the vocaloid portion of the game with this version, however. If you have a Japanese 3DS, you can PM me for a code.

 

out of the 305,938 members on gbatemp, you thought you had the only one?
i'm a gateway user, i use the game just fine, you can go online with gateway.
just, if you happened to have a 3ds that is not japanese, you cannot download the updates for the game, which are pretty necessary.
i expect in the future people will be able to use updates for games of different regions anyway, very recently we have been publicly able to decrypt 3ds games, eshop games (maybe updates too) might be close too (publicly).
hopefully one day we will be able to share songs, that would be really cool.

 

I see. Well, I only ask because I'm thinking of jumping into the 3DS hacking scene, just for this game (I wrote Degausser before for DX). I was mainly wondering whether it would be worth the effort looking into the v1.0 rom when the entire game/file formats might have possibly changed by the new version. I've looked at the list of changes on http://wikiwiki.jp/bandbrosp/?%B9%B9%BF%B7%A5%C7%A1%BC%A5%BF but I wouldn't even recognise half of those features without having played the game. All the same, I'm sure there will be advancements in savegame-hacking in the near future, but for now I'm attempting to "import" the four songs back into DX (i.e. figure out as much of the file format as possible at this stage).

 

Okay, maybe I over exaggerated. lol

Wow, I wish you good luck but you are going to run into some problem doing it.

Like:
- 10 instrument track
- song can have both "piano" and "guitar" chords track
- guitar chords track is much more advance
- song can go up to 150 measurement for 4/4 time signature or 200 measurement for 3/4
- two sets of effects for each track

So, yeah...

 

Double post, but the good news is that the file format hasn't really changed significantly from BDX. It's largely an extension of the BDX format rather than a complete rewrite. There are some parts I'm not 100% sure of but which would probably be solved relatively easily by spending some time in composer mode rather than guessing.

On the other hand, I'm pretty much out of material to mess around with. For those with actual downloaded songs on a japanese 3ds, do you know if these songs are saved individually on the SD card? If so, are they all encrypted with the same key on the same console (meaning if we know one song exactly we can figure out the other songs)?

Technical details:

Warning: Spoilers inside!

\Gak3\8001000x\pack contains 2 GZip'd streams: the 85564-byte record, and a 864168-byte Vocaloid thing which I haven't really looked at.

Code:

Address  Size(bytes)   Description
 00000           2     Magic1 / major version
 00002           2     Magic2 / minor version
 00004           4     Record ID
 00008           4     Date created
 0000C           4     Date modified
 00010         504     Song title
 00208           1     Number of lines [plus 6]
 00209           1     Time signature [3 or 4]
 0020A           1     Master volume?
 0020B           1     Main instrument??
 0020C         480     Instrument info (10 * 48 bytes)
 003EC       24000     Musical notes (10 * 2400 bytes)
 061AC       12000     Unknown mask??? (10 * 1200 bytes)
 0908C         512     Tempo changes
 0928C       10240     Volume changes (10 * 1024 bytes)
 0BA8C        5120     Range(??) changes (10 * 512 bytes)
 0CE8C        5120     Effector changes [0 or 1] (10 * 512 bytes)
 0E28C          80     More instrument info?? (10 * 8 bytes)
 0E2DC         128     Guitar chord stuff??
 0E35C        1056     Guitar original chords? (48 * 22 bytes)
 0E77C        4800     Guitar chord stuff???
 0FA3C         240     Piano chord stuff? (120 * 2 bytes)
 0FB2C         256     Piano original chords (64 * 4 bytes)
 0FC2C        6000     Karaoke lyrics
 1139C        6000     Karaoke timing
 12B0C        6600     Unknown??? (11 * 600 bytes)
 144D4        1204     Piano chord change table (4 + 300 * 4)
 14988        1204     Guitar chord change table (4 + 300 * 4)
 14E3C   -----------------END-----------------