Final Fight AE CPS2 Music and Sound Effects Ported, Alpha Date Announced!
After two months of studying, developing tools and manipulating data, we have Final Fight CPS1 sound effects and music (mostly) ported to CPS2!
We began by analyzing the CPS1 sound driver and reading documentation for the ADPCM sampler chip, called the OKI. Based on Gnawtor's previous work, many of the data structures had already been identified. The ADPCM samples were easily extracted and converted using a tool by SuperCTR. After doing some poking around with the music data, we determined the location of the FM configuration table within the audio driver, and figured out the channel assignment used in CPS1 music tracks. SuperCTR reached out to us over Twitter and was able to give us a tremendous amount of detail about Q-Sound, its capabilities, and potential pitfalls. He also pointed out an existing program called VGMTrans which already (mostly) understands CPS2 music formats. With this new knowledge we were able to easily analyze the CPS2 music structure and plan out the tools that would be necessary to organize and develop the data.
Our efforts resulted in the creation of two new utilities for converting the music to QSound format: CPSMusicTool and CPS2InstrumentConfig.
These tools allow us to organize the sample data, track data, and other pieces of data that make up CPS2 instruments and music. The music tool also has the ability to directly convert CPS1 music sequences to CPS2, meaning our music conversions are 1:1 accurate with the original music. With these tools in hand, we began piecing together the sound effects and music. When the tools got to a state where we could properly hear the Slums theme playing in a QSound driver, it was time to hand these tools off to griefspammer, our audio engineer.
The auditory splender you have just experienced was made possible by creating nice samples of multiple octaves of each of the FM instruments and meticulously converting them to CPS2 instruments. As of now the first round's music is done in its mono form, and many more songs are beginning to take shape. Griefspammer will be working his magic on the rest of the tracks over the next month... which brings us to our big announcement!
One month from now, on or about November 11th, we will be doing the initial alpha for Final Fight AE CPS2!!!
The remaining sprite issues that can be seen in the video (CPS2 does not have the "palette masking" feature present in CPS1) will be resolved through the use of additional sprites to provide the needed layers. Development is on track and our audio engineer is killing it in the music department. Alpha testers, prepare your MiSTer or Darksoft Multi, because Final Fight AE is coming in hot!
Comments (1)
Amazing! Thank you for your efforts! Definitely playing this with my friends to celebrate the release of the alpha.