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FamiTracker
[url=http://tcrf.net/Donkey_Kong_%28Arcade%29#Unused_Music]Here be the link. I was hacking on the game's sound ROM, having it play random crap, when suddenly it started playing new, unfamiliar music! Freaky, eh? Took me a few hours to figure out how to reproduce it and get clean rips of it all, but I did it!
Interesting. The first couple bars of the first Cutscene theme reminds me a bit of Wagner's Meistersinger Overture.
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I record (some) NSFs on hardware. Feel free to [url=http://www.famitracker.com/forum/posts.php?id=3633]request a hardware render.
Definitely interesting, especially since I'm working on a MAME build myself. I really like the hidden message the developers left; it's as though they were expecting pirates & reversers to explore the ROM (& it looks like the developers were desperate to get more people on the workforce).
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
I've just discovered that DK uses a 64-byte wavetable to generate triangle waves. They had 64 bytes and the best they could come up with was a triangle?!
Well, I wouldn't say that's the best they could come up with, though I still blame the engineers for not streamlining their circuitry. I mean; the Intel 8035 sound processor used for the arcade game didn't have any internal ROM. The whole system (running off of a Z80) relied on 15 external ROM chips for program, graphical & music data, plus a D/A converter. I think it's just Ikegami's engineers of the time, telling themselves "this is tried, tested & true technology, so we won't bother making it work better since it just works."
I guess this was a similar mentality for many arcade manufacturers (especially since they had to push out so many cabinets back than,) but I guess things became more efficient for Nintendo when they released the Vs. System. The sad thing is that they made it as an upgrade kit to their Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. & Popeye cabinets, without a Vs. System port for either of those games.
EDIT: That first voice sample of Pauline; I don't think it says "hey" or "thanks." I think it says "play" & could have been used during prototyping, as a sound effect once a player inserts a coin.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
Well, there's another fact that might explain the "lousy" hardware design of those early arcade cabinets:
The Donkey Kong machines were never meant to play Donkey Kong, they once were "Radar Scope"-Machines. Sadly, this title never took off internationally for some reason and so, a young man named Shigeru Miyamoto was commisioned to produce a game that could run on unsold Radar Scope - machines.
That might explain some of the rather unlogical design choices.
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I'd love to see that, but one thing I'd also like to see is a successfull rip of the Pauline sound samples. I think it could be useful for some indie game developer who uses FamiTracker for their music.
[quote=Alexander283]Well, there's another fact that might explain the "lousy" hardware design of those early arcade cabinets:
The Donkey Kong machines were never meant to play Donkey Kong, they once were "Radar Scope"-Machines. Sadly, this title never took off internationally for some reason and so, a young man named Shigeru Miyamoto was commisioned to produce a game that could run on unsold Radar Scope - machines.
That might explain some of the rather unlogical design choices.[/quote]
Definitely; that actually does explain a lot about the early arcade cabinets before the Vs. System series. And I could see why Radar Scope didn't make it out so well back than; I'm glad I'm not including it in my collection.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
I may still work on the MML tool, since it shouldn't take long to write one, but I've got my sights on something better: a conversion of Donkey Kong to run on Donkey Kong 3 hardware.
Donkey Kong 3 uses a pair of 2A03s to generate sound. Not one, but two! They each have 8 KB ROM and 512 bytes of RAM. Since they're dedicated to sound and so don't have to share the ROM or RAM space with anything else, I believe that should be sufficient for using FamiTracker with them.
Sounds like a good plan, but are you positive that the two 2A03 chips in DK3 are solely dedicated to audio generation?
I ask this because, as you already know (& I'm sure that you know the whole matter much better than I do,) the 2A03 is basically a 6502 with an APU, game controller polling & direct memory access. In an NES, it's both the CPU & APU, but in a DK3 cabinet, there are two configured as peripherals to a Z80 CPU; if it's anything like a DK cabinet, one of the 2A03 chips might be a dedicated APU, while the other might be configured as a DAC. I could be very wrong, though; it would help if spec sheets are available concerning this.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
Now all you'd need to do is swap the firmware chip that holds the colour palette, then figure out a way to port the audio between the two games, or rewrite the music entirely & target one of the 2A03 chips. Which one; I don't know, but I'm sure one will be a DAC while the other's the APU.
Can you share a picture of the main board?
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
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