[Eliminate Music Cuts in Raine]

[BootSector]

The intention here is to put the complete songs in the games that contain them in a summarized form to run in the Raine emulator.
Hello everyone! I recently picked up the Z80 study book. However, I think it is too much content for something simple. I would like some solution to eliminate the exchange of music during the rounds in games like The King of Fighters 95, 96, for example. The Raine Emulator is able to keep the song while loading through the option "Sound Options -> Awiays stop CD music while loading", however, when the round starts, another track starts without continuing the full song and interrupting it. Does anyone know about any solution?

Edited May 18, 2020 by BootSector

[mer-curious]

Hello! I believe this has to do with the way the games were programmed probably due to RAM limitations of the NGCD system. SNK also did this for all KOF ports for PS1 (I don't know about the Saturn ports, maybe they work differently because of the additional RAM cartridges). I suppose you would have to change something in the game to avoid this track changing between the rounds. 🤔

Alternatively, you could use the sound associations option in Raine to play the MVS/AES versions with the arranged sound tracks from the NGCD ports. That way you would have the best graphics (no sprites cut) and the best sound with non-stop tracks between the rounds. I suggested the inclusion of this feature in Raine some years ago mainly because of this limitation of the CD versions, as I am a KOF fan. But my idea came from the Nebula emulator, which introduced this feature back in 2005 if I'm not wrong. Since Nebula is over a decade no longer updated, Raine is the only emulator maintained in which you have this feature as far as I know.

[BootSector]

Thank you for answering. I will do some tests on the version of Raine for now, as I like its fluidity in the emulation and use it with 2x / hq2x / 3x rendering. I will do tests with MVS.
Note: I use 0.63.6 for compatibility with some games that require raster like Super Sidekicks and Neo Turf Masters and 1.2.13 for the rest.

[LoveNeo]

On 5/18/2020 at 3:53 PM, mer-curious said:

Alternatively, you could use the sound associations option in Raine to play the MVS/AES versions with the arranged sound tracks from the NGCD ports.

I've been wanting to do this for many years, can someone provide more information on this, thanks.

[Tux]

13 hours ago, LoveNeo said:

I've been wanting to do this for many years, can someone provide more information on this, thanks.

Basically the sound commands menu option allows you to associate an audio track (mp3, ogg, wav...) to be played instead of what the normal sound command plays.

It's a game of patience because you must 1st find out which command starts which audio track. Mer-curious has done it for quite a few kof games and even posted its results in the forum with the mp3 tracks from the neocd version, and the config file containing the association. If you take his file, you'll have to edit the config file manually to fix the paths, but it should still be much easier than finding all the tracks by yourself.

[LoveNeo]

The config file from Mer-curious was extremely helpful, thanks.

What put me off when I first tried, was the fact that the sound can go silent if you make changes while game is running.

So you load up the game and make the associations then run it.

Tux you outdid yourself on this, it's a remarkable feature.

The only problem now, is the WAV files won't loop in stage, even though loop is selected.

I take it Tux you have looked at doing this for capcom games, but ran into complications?

Street fighter alpha 2 & 3, forgotten worlds, mercs and so forth, would be a joy to play with this feature.

And a big thanks to Tux for still doing this.

[Tux]

11 hours ago, LoveNeo said:

The only problem now, is the WAV files won't loop in stage, even though loop is selected.

Works for me, I did a quick test on 3countb using a short wav file recorded from raine, the intro "sound" just after the neogeo logo, it works, it looped 3 times.

I have in games.cfg for 3countb :

57 = /home/manu/.raine/raine_sound.wav
loop57 = 1

By the way it's usually better to use mp3 or ogg for this instead of wav, you'll save a lot of disk space without being able to tell the difference just by listening to what is produced.

For capcom games, no it's just that this must be done separately for each game, or group of games if they share the same z80 sound driver, and nobody was motivated enough until now to look into the capcom case. And sorry, no motivation for this for now... !

For finding associations, actually when you display the sound command dialog it shows by default the last music command the z80 received, so if you play a game and want to replace a specific track, just go to the place this track is played, display the dialog and it should already be selected, you can test it to check it's the right one, now you can just associate it to something else. The sound commands dialog is available only for games supporting it of course, mainly neogeo games for now but not all of them, gunbird and bublbobl, not because I use this but it seemed easy to do at the time so I added these 2 but they are mainly untested...

But then when you test something in the dialog, it uses the z80 from the game to play it, so when you return to the game the song is usually stopped, you can reset the game or reload a savegame to restore the z80 state to normal.

By the way did you know the test mode for sfa3 sounds includes a graphic equalizer ? 1st time I see that in a test mode, that's a rather polished test mode ! Musics are codes <= 2f for sfa3, <= $3f for sfa2 (just had a quick look at how it works by curiosity, it's quite different from the usual arcade game... !). U key to enter test mode...

Edited June 16, 2021 by Tux

[mer-curious]

I still plan to do a super complete games.cfg file with all possible sound associations and post it here so people can enjoy NG games the best way possible. But I need to check all SNK ports for Saturn and PS1 to see which received soundtrack arrangements. I know WakuWaku 7 did (and I've already added it to the file) so it's possible that others did too. Some PS2 ports such as Garou and KOF2001 also got soundtrack "improvements" but the quality doesn't even compare to the SNK sound team from the '90s (possibly because SNK bankrupted in the beginning of the 2000's).

Anyway, I'm very grateful to Tux for adding this feature. 😊

[LoveNeo]

16 hours ago, Tux said:

I have in games.cfg for 3countb :

57 = /home/manu/.raine/raine_sound.wav
loop57 = 1

My config file didn't have that loop comment, will try adding that to my tracks.

 

I'm going to try joining songs that are in two parts, to play as one continuous song.

In the KOF games the second part of the songs are very good as well.

Would be good if you could associate more than one track at a time, for all I know maybe you can?

Matrimelee seems to be another NEO game that can't have it's music replaced, I spent a long time trying but got no result.

Just to clarify, I mean with the CD versions of the songs as a lot of the music is excellent already on that game.

Thanks to mer-curious, I know about this feature, and a big thank you to Tux for creating raine.

 

[Tux]

Yes for matrimelee, it's recognized as a kof game because the z80 rom looks a lot like it, but it fails, it doesn't have its pointers initialized correctly.

This feature is a work in progress for most games, I might fix matrim later (and eventually add some cps2 games, at least for those they seem to always use the same way to send commands so it might be compatible with all cps2 games there).

[mer-curious]

12 hours ago, LoveNeo said:

I'm going to try joining songs that are in two parts, to play as one continuous song.

In the KOF games the second part of the songs are very good as well.

You could try using the soundtrack releases on CD instead of the NGCD version. They have the full tracks without any breaks. This is what I did with KOF2000 because it didn't receive a NGCD version, only a soundtrack release. You can find soundtracks for NG games on sites such as https://downloads.khinsider.com/. Just look for the releases which have "arranged" in the title (or "image album" in case of the Fatal Fury games).

I didn't know Matrimelee associations was broken. It would be great to fix it because the arranged soundtrack is awesome! 🤩