Stardust Sound Patcher Tutorial - How to Load and Create Sound Patches for CPS3 Games

This is a tutorial for soundmodding CPS3 games with Stardust Sound Patcher. If you don't know what that is, click here.

This tutorial is also on the Stardust Sound Patcher wiki.

In this tutorial, I'll give a brief overview of how to use Stardust Sound Patcher. This guide may be updated for future releases of the program.

This guide is written assuming that you have Stardust Sound Patcher downloaded, in addition to having a CPS3 ROM and some spare sound files on-hand. Do not ask me where to get said ROM, search the tubes for that.

Run StardustSoundPatcher.exe. When prompted, navigate to the location of your unzipped CPS3 ROM folder. You should be greeted with this screen:

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It may seem a bit intimidating at first, so let's break down what each component does:
  • The File 30 and File 31 Radio Buttons allow you to switch between audio data contained in File 30, and audio data contained in File 31.
  • The Start Time boxes allow you to specify the point in the audio data that you want to replace with new audio.
  • The Length Time boxes allow you to specify the length of the chunk of audio you want to replace.
  • The Play and Stop buttons allow you to play back the audio chunk defined by the Start and Length times.
  • The Sampling Rate defines the speed at which to play the audio.
  • The audio amplification allows you to amplify imported audio data to a certain degree.
If you wanted to go about replacing a sound effect in a game, you would have to know at what point the sound is played in the audio file. Try adjusting the start and length times until you find the sound effect you're looking for. It may also be easier to use a third-party audio editor like Audacity to determine when the sound effect plays. Be sure to adjust the length time so that you don't overwrite other sound effects in the file!

Once you know when and for how long your chosen sound effect plays, try adjusting the sampling rate. Different sound effects may play at different sampling rates, so you may have to mess with this value to get the sound effect to play at the same speed as in-game. The start and length times automatically adjust depending on the sampling rate, however, you may have to tweak them slightly in order to get the same chunk of audio; the time conversion, as of the time of this writing, isn't perfect. Remember, you can preview your sound with the Play and Stop buttons!

Once you've got your sound playing at the correct speed, you can import a new sound effect over the old one by clicking on the "Load Sound File..." button towards the bottom-left of the program. From here, navigate to your sound file that you want to replace the old sound effect with.

Once you've imported the sound file, after a few seconds, you should see a new entry under the Sound Patches list:

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Try playing back your sound effect now. The old sound effect should now be replaced with the new sound effect you imported from the audio file.

If the sound effect sounds too soft or too loud, you can always adjust this by messing with the audio amplification factor, then re-importing the audio clip.

Rinse and repeat this process for all sound effects you want to replace. Once you're done, click on "Export Sound Patch..." to save your patches to a ZIP file, or click "Patch Changes" to apply your sound patches to your 30 and 31 files.

Once your files are patched, simply re-zip your ROM folder, and you're done!
  1. Open up StardustSoundPatcher.exe, and navigate to your unzipped CPS3 ROM.

  2. Click on the "Load Sound Patch..." Button.

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  3. Navigate to wherever you stored your sound patch. Your sound patch should be a zip file containing a patch.json, in addition to several other MP3, WAV, and AIFF files.

  4. Wait a few seconds. After a while, you should see several entries added to the Sound Patches list view.

  5. Click on the "Patch Changes" button to write all of your changes to the 30 and 31 files.

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  6. Re-zip your ROM folder, and you're done! You can load said ZIP file into FBA afterwards.

Let me know if there's anything that needs to be clarified, and I'll update the guide accordingly.
 

Azel

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really cool too!

but what if, instead of making patches for rom for FBA, I wanted to directly patch my CPS3 roms and run them on my cps3 ? ^^
 
D

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really cool too!

but what if, instead of making patches for rom for FBA, I wanted to directly patch my CPS3 roms and run them on my cps3 ? ^^
I unfortunately don't have an actual CPS3 on-hand, so I don't know any of this for certain, but, from the looks of it, you're probably going to need a custom security cartridge and BIOS in order to run a game with modifications made on actual hardware. Depending on the romset you're using, you may have to reconstruct an ISO from the patched images, and that should run fine on actual hardware, given that you have a working cartridge for the game you're using. You may need to correct the checksums for the ISO to work, though I could be wrong on that one.

If loading a custom ISO doesn't work, apparently you can use a SuperBIOS cart to load data into each of the CPS3's SIMMs manually, but that will still require a working original cartridge for the game you want to play.

Here's my main source; it comes from a thread discussing playing Street Fighter III: 4rd Strike on actual hardware.

Try asking around on different forums, see what people have to say on this. I'm by no means an authority on running ROM Hacks on hardware, so I'm not sure if this info is 100% accurate. Hope you can get this to work, though.
 

Azel

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Yeah, I own all that. (regular SH2 in my cart, instead of "capcom" SH2) my question is, "how do I build "regular" roms, instead of the way you're doing it, with patches in zips, if I understood corectly.
 
D

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Yeah, I own all that. (regular SH2 in my cart, instead of "capcom" SH2) my question is, "how do I build "regular" roms, instead of the way you're doing it, with patches in zips, if I understood corectly.
From the looks of it, you should be able to rip an existing ISO image from a CD you already own, replace the files in said ISO, and burn the patched ROM to a new CD. From what I've gathered, the CD and FBA v0.2.96 ROMs share pretty much the same file structure, with each file in the ROM/CD representing data to be loaded into the CPS3's SIMMs. Not sure if there's anything else you may need to do, but try that and see what happens.

EDIT: To stay on the safe side, only replace the files that have been patched. 10 and 20 contain important program data IIRC, so it's probably best not to touch those files unless you know what you're doing (I've heard some ROMs altering these files in order to get them to work with certain BIOSes).
 
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