SNES games with CD music

I recently picked up a sd2snes:







The label isn't the greatest but smeh.  Just a warning anybody getting one from retrogate I recommend not ordering it with a case.  The case I got is very cheap looking I wound up cutting holes in a spare stunt race fx super famicom case.

I'm very very impressed with this device, it's absolutely worth the money.  Getting it going was fairly easy.  Using it is fairly easy.  Mapper recreation is very well done.  Games of all sizes load instantly.

I looked into the msu mapper.  When googling for msu1 games I came across this blog post where the poster suggests using the msu1 to hack cd quality music into classic games:

content.easybib.com/citation-guides/mla-format/how-to-cite-a-blog-mla/#.U5Ci33bLCd4

The code posted here didn't work, I wrote my own code from scratch after reading technical documents on how the msu-1 mapper works.

After a day of tinkering around I managed to get it going:



I never considered using the msu1 mapper this way.  I think this is a great idea and it's something I can slowly work on in my spare time.  With this device people can hack cd audio quality into snes games and see what it would have been like if the snes had a cd attachment.  Having audio stream from a sd card is perfect, no cd skips or loading errors.

sd2snes is friggin awesome. It also supports the bs-x games. But i find it distracting having to load up the bs-x bios first.

I have a patch that will run bsx games without the bios and i prefer using that.

also - i have yet to have noticed a glitchy game on it, it seems to work on any console or revision you put it in, and its still being updated.

its a win win.

Im really hoping SA-1 gets worked on soon. its about the last thing left besides superfx - which i personally dont care about.

I really think this is great.
Seems like magic to me.

MaxWar wrote:

I really think this is great.
Seems like magic to me.

It's just snes assembly language, but I guess that's magic to some people.  Anyway since making this post I've finished link to the past:



And f-zero:



The F-Zero video some of the audio might be missing because of youtube audio copyright claims.

I'm currently working on the same treatment for metal combat: falcon's revenge.  I have the game mostly done.  It's taking a lot longer with metal combat because the way it selects audio track is really complicated and I needed to program in a custom decoding system.

Drakon wrote:

MaxWar wrote:

I really think this is great.
Seems like magic to me.

It's just snes assembly language, but I guess that's magic to some people.

Of course it is "just" snes assembly language but it seems like magic not so much because of that but rather I never imagined this could be possible using real hardware.

MaxWar wrote:

Drakon wrote:

MaxWar wrote:

I really think this is great.
Seems like magic to me.

It's just snes assembly language, but I guess that's magic to some people.

Of course it is "just" snes assembly language but it seems like magic not so much because of that but rather I never imagined this could be possible using real hardware.  

Well in that respect you're correct.  The snes hardware isn't at all capable of this.  The only thing the snes is doing is mixing the audio from the cartridge slot with the system audio.  The audio is being generated 100% by the sd2snes fpga and a dac chip on the sd2snes pcb.  What's interesting is there are many consoles with audio input pins in the cartridge slot that could do the same thing.  For example the sega genesis, gameboy and gbc, japanese famicom.  If someone made fpga (or cpld?) flash devices with their own cd audio mappers then this theoretically could be done on other consoles and handhelds as well just as long as the cartridge connector has an audio input pin somewhere.

Anyway...I did turtles in time:



This is my best hack yet, I used all the tricks I learned messing with other games and added some new tricks.  This hack automatically plays the original snes music if I didn't program in a cd audio track for the track it's trying to load.  This is very useful for all those short little tracks that aren't worth converting into cd audio.  With previous hacks like my link to the past one for short songs I had to come up with a cd audio recording.  This was easier to work with simply because this game has a sound test mode which made it easier to figure out how to decode the music track number.  The music volume even mutes when I pause the game.

mabeye they are using cheaper cases now the one i got with mine was solid I had no complaints about it. Mabeye krikzz is having to get them from a different supplier with all thats going on in Ukraine.

the Msu1 is great. Have you checked out roadblasters yet?

mvsfan wrote:

mabeye they are using cheaper cases now the one i got with mine was solid I had no complaints about it. Mabeye krikzz is having to get them from a different supplier with all thats going on in Ukraine.

the Msu1 is great. Have you checked out roadblasters yet?

Road Blaster was the first thing I tried, it's not that great of a game unfortunately.  The audio quality in Road Blaster is horrible it really doesn't show off how good the wav music can sound.  I'm still not a fan of FMV as I never liked videos in video games.  If I had known that it's possible to hack cd audio into commercial games then I would have gotten myself a sd2snes a long time ago. The sd2snes really surpassed my expectations.

the next main thing that is going to be implemented is a cheat code engine.

Ikari just made another update to his sd2snes page.

I am far from an fmv fan. The sega cd had many great games - too bad most of them were released in japan.

the best U.S. games on the sega cd are the few games that are not fmv games - Lunar, Vay, Bari-arm, Final Fight etc.

Done Super Metroid:

Chrono Trigger first demo.



This is by far the most complicated hack I've done.  It's coming along well though.

Chrono Trigger is done:

Final Fantasy 6 is in the works:

Very nice!

The only problem I have with those so far Is that I think I still prefer the original SNES sound XD
But I may not be representative of the average listener as I am a big fan of the chip tune sound.
I must still say FFVI is my favourite one so far, I really like the ''CD'' version most of the time but I still think the Intro Snow March is more epic with the Original sound.

If I knew how to do that I would replace the music in Der Langrisser by the superior Genesis version.

MaxWar wrote:

Very nice!

The only problem I have with those so far Is that I think I still prefer the original SNES sound XD
But I may not be representative of the average listener as I am a big fan of the chip tune sound.
I must still say FFVI is my favourite one so far, I really like the ''CD'' version most of the time but I still think the Intro Snow March is more epic with the Original sound.

If I knew how to do that I would replace the music in Der Langrisser by the superior Genesis version.

Well the music can have any wav put over it, this is just the remastered music I decided to use.  Later I'm thinking of looking at dracula x on the snes and giving it the pc engine dracula xx soundtrack.  I poked at it before and didn't get far but I've learned a lot since then.

The way I program my engine I can choose which songs to play cd tracks and which to play as original dsp.  I haven't bothered writing an engine that automatically plays dsp if no cd track is found, I just hard code in the list of what track plays what. Probably down the road I'll look into seeing if I can alter the engine to play a dsp track if the cd track isn't found to make it easier to choose which songs to play as a cd track and which remain original dsp.

I definitely prefer the cd remastered versions of the tracks.  FF6 definitely sounds amazing with the original soundtrack but I still think the remastered tracks sound better because there's no muffle or limit to instrument quality.  Plus it's fun to make something like this.