RaidenMAME: Music Sample Hack for Raiden Fighters 1/2/JET

[BPzeBanshee]

MUSIC SAMPLE HACK FOR RAIDEN FIGHTERS SERIES
--- Acknowlegments ---
Created by BPzeBanshee with help from the guys at #shmups, Robbert over at MAMEWorld and #messdev.
MAME and MAME Plus! made by their respective authors.
Samples (C)Seibu Kaihatsu Inc.

--- Disclaimer ---
I am not responsible for your inability to read, or for your computer breaking or doing funny things if you do something stupid with this build.
I am also not responsible for you not having the skills to use MAME, nor am I responsible for hurting your feelings for any reason.
If there is a critical problem, however, like certain game sets not working that others can confirm, and it's *specific to this build*, feel free to report.
Do not report to MAMEdev for issues relating to this build. I did the hack, not them. They can help you learn2useMAME, maybe.

IN SHORT DO NOT EXPECT HELP FOR:
- Any problems relating to MAME or MAME Plus itself
- Learning to use MAME
- ROM problems

--- Downloads ---
All downloads are available externally via the Wordpress site. Do not link directly to downloads featured here, only the front page. Thanks.

Binaries built from MAME Plus! 0.155

--- Instructions ---
1. Use 7-zip to extract your MAME binary of choice.
2. Add a 'samples' folder. Remove '_samples' from the names of the sample ZIPs and put them in said folder.
3. Run program.

--- About ---
This is a modified MAME build I came up with that plays samples for background music instead of emulating it.
Pretty damn simple, huh?

--- Story ---
The sound in the Raiden Fighters games have been inaccurate for a long time, and anyone getting it right is a long time coming.
Raiden Fighters Aces has a damn good soundtrack but not everyone has access to it.
And to top it all off, DotEmu have recently published an unstable buggy-as-all-fuck program called 'Raiden Legacy' for iOS devices and PCs, the PC build sporting 'HD' music in its own MAME hack.

I got fed up with it all and decided to go the route of ThunderMAME and make my own sample hack
for Raiden Fighters JET as a result. When I finally got it done and working properly in a way
that didn't break anything else, I decided to go ahead and do it for RF1 and RF2 as well. Since there's an interest in it shown by folks who are having issues with Raiden Pieceofshit Legacy, I'm making a public release.

--- Pros/Cons ---
+ Music better than MAME emulation
+ Custom Autofire (and proper autofire unlike Raiden Legacy's idea of 'autofire')
+ Runs like the arcade version so slaves etc are in, just like normal MAME
+ Is actually stable (unless I broke something), just like normal MAME
+ Access to dipswitch settings, just like normal MAME
- I'm not touching the shit '2000' OKI versions, hack those yourself
- Music may be too awesome for the sfx, just turn up the ymf channels in-game if you like your half-missing sfx
- Sample system only supports mono FLACs at best (Raiden Legacy hacked in stereo OGGs) and looping is hardpacked into the samples because there's no samples_isplaying function in MAME natively
- Looping is baked in to the samples so RFJet's ROM jingle sounds funny and other tracks have loops baked in, resulting in more filesize than ideal

[Fudoh]

Pulled because system11 says it's illegal apparently which kind of defeats the purpose of this whole post. Feel free to convert your own personal copy of the OST into mono FLACs and ZIP them though.

haven't the links to those Toaplan/WolfMAME samples been posted up and down here on the board ??

[BPzeBanshee]

EDIT: Put everything externally, so downloads are available from raidenmame.wordpress.com.

If God forbid there's still issues I'll just put instructions for making your own sample ZIPs instead (it isn't hard).

[IseeThings]

There's nothing illegal about the MAME mods as long as you're offering the source and not bundling anything with the ROMs.

I doubt the dotemu guys are in much of a position to complain either with their emulator using MAME CPU cores and all that

With that in mind I can't however say I really like the idea much in the first place (although at least in this case it isn't damaging to the overall goal of getting proper emulation like the Toaplan ones are, we need those decapped, which requires money and experts, not hacks!) and only offering crappy mono music rather defeats the point!

If you want a hack to bypass the countdown then you could look at the data format of the files MAME dumps in the nvram directory, create a fake 'flash0' and 'flash1' region in the ROM definitions, and write code in the DRIVER_INIT to copy the data from the sample roms into those regions in the format the game wants.

[BPzeBanshee]

Well the samples are a separate download and placed on the Wordpress page I made. If there continues to be issues with the matter, I'll remove the links and just provide instructions for making your own sample files, it isn't hard to do. The main effort here is just the modified MAME build.

If I knew a way to get stereo support for the sample system MAME without it being a hack I'd probably do it and then submit it for official builds (no seibuspi modifications, just the stereo sample addition). I imagine since it was only really meant for discrete games anyway it'd get rejected.

Regarding the countdown, I'll take a look into it. I'm not really trying to bypass it completely per say but rather replace the music used without screwing it up. sound_fifo_w goes apeshit with values and trying to trap/submit different values from any of those that get passed through result in the ROM transfer failing. At the moment I'm just letting it do its thing and replacing the rest (including a second address for the ROM transfer tune as used in the selection screens for Normal/Special/Expert in some sets).

[Skykid]

Bravo! Great work dude.

[yosai]

Regarding the countdown, I'll take a look into it. I'm not really trying to bypass it completely per say but rather replace the music used without screwing it up. sound_fifo_w goes apeshit with values and trying to trap/submit different values from any of those that get passed through result in the ROM transfer failing.

The countdown audio is separate from the game audio afaik. I had a RF2 cart where the countdown music was perfect but all in game music (and effects iirc) were garbled.

[IseeThings]

the countdown music only uses the FM capabilities of the chip, not sample playback. (because obviously it's being played while flashing the sample flash roms on the motherboard, so it's unlikely the sound chip can even access the samples at that point)

[BPzeBanshee]

Ah, that makes sense now. Trust me not to figure the obvious even looking in the driver.

If it's through FM on the chip and the Z80 sound fifos are being used to write to the sample flash roms on the motherboard then I may need to take a different approach. I don't suppose you'd know if there was a way to mute the ymf channels after having them declared in MACHINE_CONFIG_START()?

If I could do that then I could simply mute the ymf channels and have my mono speaker on and playing the ROM test sample instead, and the average user would be none the wiser. I haven't found a way to do this though, I suspect because maybe there isn't one?

[DocHauser]

Thanks for this. I managed to celebrate in fine style by getting a 1cc in Raiden Fighters 2 for the first time.

[BPzeBanshee]

Nice! Saw your highscore, not bad (wish I got that much in RF2)!

Good news too. I got a bit of help from hap regarding the recent modernisations so futureproofing of this hack is now safe. The external 7200fifo device doesn't seem to be present in MAME Plus for the moment though so I'll have to wait till MAME's next release (and for MAME Plus to catch up) to provide a build with custom button support. In the meantime, I'm brainstorming ideas for what to expand on. Adding sound effects that currently don't play correctly/at all in seibuspi.c would be nice but I doubt getting sound effects from anywhere other than a direct copy of Aces/the 2000 China versions is possible let alone likely.

On a more reasonable note, I figured since I'm going with the 'RaidenMAME' title it would probably make sense to actually have the other 'Raiden' titles in there, for starters. I think the sound in Raiden is pretty good anyway but maybe an optional lagless hack dipswitch may be of use if I ever get around to it - ThunderMAME did this with several drivers including seibuspi.c IIRC but original Raiden uses generic buffering so I'm not sure if a toggleable method could be used there.

If there's any other suggestions (within reason), maybe dare I say other drivers to sample hack, feel free to suggest a title.

[HydrogLox]

I figured since I'm going with the 'RaidenMAME' title it would probably make sense to actually have the other 'Raiden' titles in there.

Or go with 'GunDogsMAME' and take the pressure off ...

[ciox]

If there's any other suggestions (within reason), maybe dare I say other drivers to sample hack, feel free to suggest a title.

Hmm, well I can think of at least one, Battle Bakraid has a high quality stereo soundtrack available, would be a joy to hear those tracks in-game instead of just "offline". Might be a big jump from Seibu to Raizing code but who knows, good work so far either way.

[trap15]

NMK!!

[BPzeBanshee]

I figured since I'm going with the 'RaidenMAME' title it would probably make sense to actually have the other 'Raiden' titles in there.

Or go with 'GunDogsMAME' and take the pressure off ...

If I expand sample hacks past just seibuspi I may very well need a different name altogether.....or leave it at RaidenMAME to always remember where it all started.

NMK!!

Playing Rapid Hero without the sample issues would be great, although you're the expert with NMK so you may have to help me out a bit for that one - the MAME driver looks even more of a clusterfuck than seibuspi.c did before hap's changes (which I may have sounded grumpy referring to before, it's definitely an improvement of some sort if not entirely noticeable in-game). I must confess I have not played the other NMK titles though.

As for Battle Bakraid, isn't it high-quality enough in-game? I find it hard to believe that mono FLACs could top how good the music is already in MAME.

[ciox]

As for Battle Bakraid, isn't it high-quality enough in-game? I find it hard to believe that mono FLACs could top how good the music is already in MAME.

The stereo soundtrack feels different enough to me, but yeah it's not really a priority over games with broken or inaccurate music.

[oboewan42]

Playing Rapid Hero without the sample issues would be great

Even if they eventually get fixed, I'm definitely going to leave an older MAME installed, for the hilariously broken emulation.

Seriously, it sounds like a 5-year-old mixed it, and it is amazing.

[IseeThings]

the code for sample loading and handling in raphero is very, very ugly.

if anybody can provide any reference to how it should be then it really needs redoing, at the very least with the modern OKI memory map / banking system rather than duplicating ROM LOAD statements which is just plain wrong.

[BPzeBanshee]

Well, looks like I wont have to touch Rapid Hero: trap15 just fixed Rapid Hero's music. Really simple apparently too. Sounds very awesome, I had a little bit of compile trouble but managed to get an NMK tiny build working with the fixed music, sounds very impressive.

[cubadoo23]

Hi banshee could you tell me how you can enable hlsl please for the emu ? Excellent work by the way . thanks

[BPzeBanshee]

I haven't got a clue about using HLSL to be honest. I imagine it'd be via INI only since the UI support for HLSL has always been erratic at best. Use a command prompt to navigate to where RaidenMAME is (typing in cd name_of_folder) and then type in

Code: Select all

rdftmame -cc

Having the -cc at the end makes it create a config file, and if memory serves me right this includes the HLSL options.

[cubadoo23]

I just get a black screen when hlsl is enabled in the ini file ? If anyone has run the emu with with hlsl id appreciate a bit of help thanks.

[BPzeBanshee]

Just ran my last compiled EXE for it with HLSL enabled and it crashed. Guess it wasn't too stable with the MAME version I compiled it with last, or something inherited from MAME Plus.

I've been meaning to update this build for a while but I can't do anything with it until I can get the hack working again with the new seibuspi.c driver (hap did a lot of changes to it during/shortly after this was made and my attempts to get it working have so far failed, and I haven't even mentioned my other obligations). Any help on this would be appreciated.

[BPzeBanshee]

It's been just about a year and much has changed. Mainly, I've finally got this thing updated and I found a way to replace the annoying ROM Test jingle, so as promised with MAME Plus 0.155 out I got this uploaded too. Links are as before available via the Wordpress site.

I made sure to add Raiden I/II/DX to the lst/mak (raiden2.c/r2dx_v33.c) so you can play those in the build as well. They run with no alterations from mainline MAME. Not an expert on HLSL but things should be a lot better in that department from how it was last year.

[Xyga]

Yay !

EDIT: just to make something clear; this build only plays Raiden games, right ?

[BPzeBanshee]

Yeah, only the Raiden games, maybe Zero Team or the Legionnaire stuff but that's it.

I plan to eventually add other stuff where sample system is appropriate, the Toaplan sample hack will need another update as the sample system has changed syntax, and I don't like ThunderMAME using separate driver names to load samples for a game when MAME already has a sample toggle option so that'll take time which I need to put on other things like health recovery and GMOSSE at the moment.

Looking to the future I've also looked into the possibility of modifying the Taito G-NET driver since no one seems interested in figuring out what's wrong with the sample loading/tinnyness in the ZSG2 system there. Good news is I figured out where the commands are going, bad news is that MAME's sample system limitations make it infeasible to really do anything of the sort for that driver without having sample folders a GB or more in size. Loop points and stereo support will go a long way to reducing filesize and making this kind of stuff feasible but I gotta figure out a way to implement those without being hacky about it (ideally I'd like for any improvements I make to the sample system to be good enough for baseline MAME to accept it and from there MAME Plus will add it). One of the big complaints against doing this kind of work for anything that isn't 0.5 second mechanical sounds is filesize, ThunderMAME's Toaplan samples are some 300-400MB per zip which could be reduced drastically if loop points were supported. Stereo support would probably add more still but the quality of the files would then justify it more I think.

[Xyga]

Something weird is happening with my RaidenMAME, double-clicking a game or trying to start it by pressing btn 1 on the joypad... closes the program.

To launch a game I have to right-click and select 'play ***'.

Also windowed doesn't work (closes the program as well).

Anyone experienced the same thing ?

Sorry I don't know if I made a basic Mame mistake or if it's related to this particular build.

[BPzeBanshee]

Same here. Seems the 32-bit MAME Plus UI mainline has been having issues of all sorts lately going from the MAMEWorld threads, it's probably related to that. Use rdftmameui64 (or the non-UI version for now if you're 32-bit locked).

[Xyga]

Thanks for the confirmation.
Using non-UI 32bit version, works fine for me now. thumbsup

[Xyga]

Up!

Would it be possible to patch GroovyMAME to use the same RF samples, or is your hack only specific to the RaidenMAME build ?