Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

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Yave Yu
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Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by Yave Yu »

Currently SPC rips in either Zophar or Joshw seems not too accuracy than newer emulator (even real hardware), such as Dragon Quest 6's world map (dream), this music has a channel that play first left then right, but the SPC rip is play them all in center... So I wonder is there has an SPC host that ripped from more accuracy emulators?
tepples
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by tepples »

I usually get rips from http://snesmusic.org/
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Yave Yu
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by Yave Yu »

tepples wrote: Fri Apr 15, 2022 8:29 pm I usually get rips from http://snesmusic.org/
Nice place, but with terrible filenames... still same problem exists, but I may check if this is GME's issue, not SPC itself...
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Yave Yu
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by Yave Yu »

Oh, that might be SPC itself's issue, use Mesen-S playing it, I hear same result...
93143
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by 93143 »

I bet somebody dumped it in mono. I have one by SpoonyBard that works properly.

On the flip side, the dump I have of DKC2 (allegedly by one Yannick Monye) has a mono fanfare, whereas the dump on snesmusic.org has a stereo fanfare. This is understandable since the game always boots in mono for some reason (it doesn't remember your audio setting despite having a save RAM), but the fanfare can also show up after a game over, and it remembers the audio setting and plays in stereo.

The Star Ocean dump I have was apparently done in Dolby Surround, which meant I had to record the tracks separately and remove some of the surround encoding to make it listenable for a private compilation I made...
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Yave Yu
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by Yave Yu »

93143 wrote: Sat Apr 16, 2022 7:54 pm I bet somebody dumped it in mono. I have one by SpoonyBard that works properly.

On the flip side, the dump I have of DKC2 (allegedly by one Yannick Monye) has a mono fanfare, whereas the dump on snesmusic.org has a stereo fanfare. This is understandable since the game always boots in mono for some reason (it doesn't remember your audio setting despite having a save RAM), but the fanfare can also show up after a game over, and it remembers the audio setting and plays in stereo.

The Star Ocean dump I have was apparently done in Dolby Surround, which meant I had to record the tracks separately and remove some of the surround encoding to make it listenable for a private compilation I made...
I listen it again, it's actually in mono... not only world map but town, ocean and might have more are in mono! So terrible, how could rippers doesn't pay attention on this, I remember DQ6's default setting is stereo...
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Bregalad
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by Bregalad »

I guess everyone makes errors, no matter how stupied they are. I cheked it up, and the rip that sits on my PC since 2003 is well and in stereo :)

For the rest I fear the rips are just copied across various sources and so if there is any error in any package it's unfortunately repeated.
Useless, lumbering half-wits don't scare us.
keennay
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by keennay »

93143 wrote: Sat Apr 16, 2022 7:54 pm I bet somebody dumped it in mono. I have one by SpoonyBard that works properly.

On the flip side, the dump I have of DKC2 (allegedly by one Yannick Monye) has a mono fanfare, whereas the dump on snesmusic.org has a stereo fanfare. This is understandable since the game always boots in mono for some reason (it doesn't remember your audio setting despite having a save RAM), but the fanfare can also show up after a game over, and it remembers the audio setting and plays in stereo.

The Star Ocean dump I have was apparently done in Dolby Surround, which meant I had to record the tracks separately and remove some of the surround encoding to make it listenable for a private compilation I made...
Hello, 1st time member here. I happened to randomly Google my name & came across this post.

Yeah I’d ripped this in 2002 when I was a teenager lol; I’d used Snes9x to rip the SPC’s & replayed them on the MS-DOS version of SPCTool (on Windows 98SE). It wasn’t until my parents upgraded to Windows XP that we had a machine capable of playing ZSNES… then I’d realized aww crap, this has a much better sound emulation than Snes9x & should’ve used that to rip SPC’s!

But yeah the technology was severely lacking at the time, especially in my case where I had to dodge a random BSOD. IIRC, the DKC2 Bonus Intro rip of mine should be stereo since I distinctly remember the saxophone & trumpet on separate channels. However, Snes9x would also play sections of the game in mono, despite selecting Stereo lol. Even JNES (JaboNES) had all sorts of random bugs at the time, specifically while trying to handle the VRC6 channel (drum toms) in Super Mario Bros 3.

No one else had a DKC2 rip at the time, so I was just happy Zophar gave me credit for my DKC rips. Tbf, these rips sounded fantastic through my 2002 speakers… maybe not the absolute best today. :mrgreen:

Anyway, those were fun times. What a 21 year flashback.
Last edited by keennay on Tue Jan 24, 2023 5:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
93143
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by 93143 »

Oh hey. Thanks for the rip.

I wasn't referring to the bonus intro (which is indeed in stereo), but rather the boot logo fanfare. It always plays in mono on first boot, so AFAIK the only way to hear it in stereo is to set the sound to stereo, get a game over, and let the game restart. I assumed the rip was from a fresh boot, which would be understandable - certainly more so than Rare's decision to default to mono and not save the preference...

The great part about SPC rips is that as long as the emulator was right about what the register settings and audio RAM contents were supposed to be, the results are limited only by the accuracy of the playback software. Usually any issues are down to the game settings used when ripping, but t's possible the emulation back then was bad enough to goof this up...

I remember the first time I saw a SNES emulator running. It was in a university residence back in 2000 or thereabouts; somebody was playing Super Mario Kart on his PC. I recall being somewhat offended at the idea of playing a Nintendo game on non-Nintendo hardware...

I've had to make a second volume of that private compilation I mentioned. Over the years since the first one, I have discovered that there were a ton of games with very good music that I had never heard of. Ocean in particular made terrible games with great soundtracks, like Waterworld and Eek! The Cat. Some games were actually undumpable as SPC, since they relied on communication with the main CPU to play tracks - Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean are the most famous for actually streaming samples from ROM during playback, but games like The Lord of the Rings and The Lost Vikings had some pretty nice music too, and it's only available in the much more obscure and less well handled SNSF format...
Zonomi
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by Zonomi »

93143 wrote: Tue Jan 24, 2023 6:59 pm and it's only available in the much more obscure and less well handled SNSF format...
Isn't SNSF supposed to be a much accurate format for handling SNES musics ?
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rainwarrior
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by rainwarrior »

Not more accurate, just more capable. SPC can only emulate a program that lives in the audio system. SNSF can have a program for both the main CPU and the audio system at the same time, allowing data streaming (or whatever else you might need of that nature).

So, for the majority of things, where the audio system did not need CPU communication for its playback, SPC is sufficient for full accuracy.
KungFuFurby
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by KungFuFurby »

I'm still ripping SPCs to this day, just that they tend not to have a home since the SNESMusic.org forums went down in 2019 (and none of them have been updated on SNESMusic.org since mid-2015). I have a massive backlog of redumps, a few new ones that are ready, and I also have some very special ones featuring games from the undumpable list as SPC rips.

In order to do rips from the undumpable list, I have to handle translations (if needed) and data implantation, as well as any extra code. The latter part means that I have to be careful with my filesize. So far, I've done everything from Eastridge Technology (except for Miracle Piano because the music is used by a different device entirely: the SPC700 is only used for the metronome) as well as two "one soundtrack" cases: one from Compedia (Mr. Bloopy Saves the World) and one from Mindscape (Mario's Early Years series).

Actually, Donkey Kong Country 2 is among my redump collection. The redumps mostly were for echo-related reasons, though in one other case I did a stereo redump.
creaothceann
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by creaothceann »

Since Zophar's Domain also hosts SPC files, you could upload them there?
My current setup:
Super Famicom ("2/1/3" SNS-CPU-GPM-02) → SCART → OSSC → StarTech USB3HDCAP → AmaRecTV 3.10
KungFuFurby
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by KungFuFurby »

They've been frozen in time as well since 2018. Plus, I wouldn't know where to submit over there: I briefly just uploaded one of my updates to the forums, and I'm not about to send a huge shipment to them through forum topics when I have no clue whether or not that would be a good idea.
bikerspade
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Re: Is the Internet has more accuracy SPC rips?

Post by bikerspade »

You can submit fixes here: https://vgm-upload.hcs64.com/
I've found several SPC files that were poorly tagged (not adhering to the SPC spec), some with incorrect xid6 header lengths, or xid6 strings not properly null-terminated and padded to 32-bit boundaries.

Some examples (I am in the midst of fixing these):
https://hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=63885
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