Feedback Requested: ZREO Music in Zelda

[bluevelvet]

Hello everyone,

This is just to get some feedback. I saw a video on YouTube way back with someone who snipped together some clips of Zelda with the music off and stitched in ZREO music and the result was quite nice.

I started looking at ways to do this and created a sorta-hackish (but working) method to do so.

However, I never completely finished the program as there were some kinks to work out.

Now I am not here to promise anything or say "oh yes I'll release it (insert arbitrary date here that will get me flamed if I miss )" - what I'm wondering is if I should continue developing this more. It was just going to be for my personal amusement so I haven't put much effort into it but several people have said they would be interested in using it if it were done.

I think it falls well in line with other "enhancement" projects like high-res texture packs and I think it would be pretty cool to be able to play the game with orchestrated music. What do you guys think? Worth it or no?

 

[mudlord]

I would like to know the technical details behind this..... (audio plugin type? methods of checking when a song plays or not....)

 

[squall_leonhart]

NOT, GUNNA, HAPPEN.

This topic has come up more then once before, and the conclusion is always the same.

 

[mudlord]

Actually, it can happen...but it is a huge amount of effort for one game. lain: That should give you a idea for a "feasible" method.

I am just going to wait till the OP responds to my question to see if it relates to the common answer...and then we know if it is a fake or not .

 

[bluevelvet]

Alright alright. I know everyone is suspicious of the newbie who starts a post yada yada. I've been to many a forum and know the whole rigmarole.

Anyway, its a C# application that checks when a certain song is playing then it plays the appropriate song in an external media player. It writes specific values into the memory of Project64 where the ROM is running to temporarily disrupt the music subsystem (but leaves the rest of the audio intact). The result is that you get ZREO music playing in the C# app in the background while playing the game with the sound disabled.

Obviously there are a few quirks here, a few of which I took care of but as I said haven't finished yet. One of them being of course if you move out of the app it needs to check if Project64 still has the focus and if not, assume that means the game is paused and thus pause the audio stream playing the MP3. And other things like that.

I appreciate the vote of confidence mudlord. Also - I didn't know people had actually brought this up before, I did a search but that was awhile back - might have been looking in the wrong forums perhaps.

 

[p_025]

People have brought up topics before of "we can replace textures, why not sounds too?" and the answer has always been the same: "texture replacement is much more straightforward as most games rely on the hardware to render textures, as emulated by the plugin. Most sound emulation, however, is software controlled." Your idea is completely feasible and could very well work, but it will only work for the Zelda game and maybe the other Zelda game if you're very, VERY lucky. You'd probably have to write an entirely different system for any and every other game you wanted to do this with.

 

[bluevelvet]

Yes it won't work in Majora's Mask because the sound memory locations are different and some of the sounds are too so you would have to toggle a mode (which I would have to add since I was only coding it for Ocarina).

Also, just to be clear - I already coded most of it and I know it works there are just some extra conditions that it doesn't completely work for (cutscenes, etc) that I would need to go through.

I was just wanting to see if people had been asking for or wanting something like this. Thanks for the feedback though.

Any other thoughts or should I be asking on another forum?

Thanks,

bluevelvet

 

[p_025]

Personally, I'd LOVE to replace some of the music from GoldenEye. There was some music that came with the GoldenEye mod for the Source Engine which is awesome.

 

[Padoca]

wow, i was thinking about it just today, and started searching here to see if exist some audio plugin that could do the job youre doing, replace ocarina music with the ZREOs

i was thinkiing in start a project replacing all the textures in ocarina with hi res (finish replacing alias) and do the same to sound !!

Would bring this classic game to to a new generation !!

if you have some way to do a plugin or something like i would like to help (althoug im tottaly newbie for this kind of thing) but kould at least help as beta tester

 

[bluevelvet]

This sounds good Padoca. I'm glad to hear someone is interested in this.

I've decided to keep working on it when I have time since everyone apparently thinks its impossible (except mudlord who I believe was referring to the method I am using - at least that of making it game specific - though he hasn't replied).

I will let you know.