ROM Hack New guy - mostly into music ripping

[muguk]

Hi all!

I couldn't find a specific 'music ripping' thread so stuck it in this one for now. If it's in the wrong place then my forum searching skills are as bad as my memory these days.

Although I'm new here as a member, I've been visiting on and off for years for lurking and learning. I'm an old skool Atari ST music ripper so I guess it's a case of 'old habits die hard'

I'm slowly getting the hang of the SDAT->MIDI+DLS->Impulse Tracker ripping (mainly tunes I like or someone has asked me to acquire so they can do a remix etc.) and bumping into the odd oldskool .MOD and .XM files along the way.

Is there a sticky of 'what you've found lurking inside a game'?

I've probably got lots of questions about some of the other common filetypes I keep seeing (video files stored as .MODS?) and common or garden ones. But they can wait until I've lurked a lot more.

I've only just learned about other the existence of other tools to extract the SDAT files (been using one tool to extract and VGTrans to convert) so more learning is good for an old lag like me to keep the grey cells ticking over.

I've been dumping all my rips (so far) into the newsgroups so they're easily found if you want to be nosey .. for at least the next 580+ days

 

[rastsan]

I'm pretty sure that the best tool (unless you've discovered vgmtoolbox and winavi with the downoldable codec). Check sourceforge for more details. other than that I haven't seen any other files other than the ones you mentioned. But then as long as they stick to tthe nitrosdk files system rules sounds could quite literally be stored whatever way is needed (lua, python on the ds).
But if your looking for someone else who's into this - there two other people other than you... I cannot remeber there names though. One has a site dedicated to nds and gba music and sound effect ripping. The other is more of the programming hobbyist looking to develop tools for homebrew. both of which I haven't really talked too or seen for a long time.
Sorry if this doesn't help.

 

[muguk]

Nice one .. always willing to learn from the experts that are out there. I'll keep my eyes open for as and when they pop their heads up.

Seen quite a few games which are LUA-based (and not encrypted) and put them to one side for a mate who develops in LUA. Always handy to have an extra sub-routine or two

Is there a (T)Wiki any where which lists all the common or garden file-types from this Nitro SDK that I can read up on?

 

[rastsan]

the the wiki quite literally at the top of the page thats been stickied here in romhacking forum although not sure if it lists all the file types - it a long read.
right near the translation request thread and the thread listing the translation projects.

And then head yourself over to romhacking.net the gba doc also covers nds but not much.

If your willing to put up with google translated try nds.bbs. something I came across while researching fonts and overlay files on the ds.

(overlays by the way can quite literally hold anything the ds programmer needs held in memory, and are one of the files on the ds that you have to be careful editing cause you don't know what you are overwriting - if you overwrite).

try crystaltile2 it has a media player in it for playing sounds and viewing graphics you'll have to veiw the filesystem and then click the right files...

Jeez I can ramble...

 

[FAST6191]

Welcome to the 'temp, always nice to have more hackers around here.

Formats:
http://llref.emutalk.net/nds_formats.htm
http://tahaxan.arcnor.com/index.php?option...=36&lang=en
http://www.pipian.com/ierukana/hacking.html
http://kiwi.ds.googlepages.com/sdat.html (SDAT sound)
http://kiwi.ds.googlepages.com/nsbmd.html (a bit old/outdated/incomplete but worth a read none the less, http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,8407.html if you are heading into the 3d world.

A sticky- not just yet but post e3 some things are set to happen (it is all good to go but e3 would overwhelm such things so I am holding it back).

Oh and sound- crystaltile2 has stuff but I mainly only use it to parse the header for when I am fiddling with the file allocation table and the like. If you want another tool then ndssndext is pretty good: http://www.4shared.com/get/68276816/809222...sndext_v04.html

You already have vgmtrans but others reading may not have seen some of the newer versions http://hcs64.com/files/VGMTrans_src_and_bin_9_29_09.zip also http://hcs64.com/vgm_ripping.html (mainly for the ADX stuff we see in several roms).

Of course you also have the option of using an emulator and blocking channels as required (you can combine it with some more regular hacking to make rare/late games happen earlier on).

 

[muguk]

Nice one .. I'd missed that version of VGMTrans as the one I was using (up until just now!) was VGMTrans_3_24_07

Will have a good look around and do some reading up. Found some real odds & ends left (by accident) inside some ROMs. Full .EXE files used to compress pictures, .BAT files used to convert video files.

Favourites have to be those 'Are You Smarter Than ' series. All the questions are left inside the ROM as plain text files. Merge them into a single Excel sheet and bung them into the newsgroups too

As for the tunes, I generally rip what I think sounds nice. So recent ones like Iron Man 2 (nice & heavy stuff) and Infinite Space (someone swallowed a 'generic choir samples CD') have been good. My rip of Burnout is an annoying one. Most of the tunes play OK but some haven't converted well at all so I've still got stuff to learn.

Are DepositFiles links OK to post? Uploaded a load of them to DF about 2 weeks ago for someone who didn't have a newsgroup connection.

Back to the research and play with this new VGMTrans

 

[FAST6191]

If you want that one of the princess maker games (without searching I think it was princess maker 4) left most of the source code inside the rom.

Alas we tend not to share full tracks from roms- very very occasionally some leeway exists but full on 500 tracks of the latest and greatest posts are right out.

 

[muguk]

If you want that one of the princess maker games (without searching I think it was princess maker 4) left most of the source code inside the rom.

Hmmm .. very interesting but me & 'C' agreed to disagree many years ago

In the good old days you had to hope the coder left the 68000 labels intact, like Populous II but the full 'C' source code, that's certainly different

QUOTE(FAST6191 @ Jun 17 2010, 08:53 PM) Alas we tend not to share full tracks from roms- very very occasionally some leeway exists but full on 500 tracks of the latest and greatest posts are right out.

No probs .. they're out there in newsgroup land. I upload them in batches