How to Enhance an SNES Game With the MSU-1 - Part 2: Slow Progress in the Face of Adversity

When last we left off, everything was terrible and there was no documentation anywhere. Well, there's still very little in the way of documentation, but not everything is terrible any more!

Update: Part 3, the climatic conclusion to this series is now available.

And thus, progress was made.

Let's get right to the good stuff that I really want to show off: MUSIC!

The biggest development since the last post is that I now have music playing in the game and it sounds pretty frickin' sweet! I have about half the soundtrack replaced in the game right now and the only tracks I have that aren't in the game are the epilogue and credit scroll. So you can't play from start to finish without noticing that things are missing, but you can wander around much of the game and not notice!

How did this happen?

This is a great question and not one I can entirely answer. I was working with my patch code and trying to figure out why nothing was working when it just started working! There's very little in the way of helpful documentation out there and I've been largely unsuccessful in getting help in forums (though admittedly I haven't tried as hard as I absolutely can... yet) but I think that the reason it began working has something to do with getting my assembler to write with 8-bit registers instead of 16-bit registers. I'm not 100% sure on this though, but I've been thoroughly avoiding looking this gift horse in the mouth for the time being and just focusing on getting everything else working before going back and fixing this.

At the end of this adventure, whether it ends in success or I give up out of frustration, I'd like to post what code I've got online in the hopes of helping others somehow. Perhaps when they come looking for a way to program for the MSU-1 on Google!

Why isn't this done yet?

There are, of course, problems still. The music doesn't play in the latest version of Higan and it doesn't play in bSNES v060 (which is the oldest version I can find online and the one that has debugging tools). Instead, it only plays in bSNES v075. I have no explanation for why this is, though I'm sure it relates to why my code suddenly started playing music. Time will tell on this one.

Another problem is that although I've got about half the soundtrack inserted into the game, I don't even have the other half of the soundtrack! As you can hear in the video above, I've been using the Zelda ReOrchestrated album for A Link to the Past as a source for the music. The main reasons I've done this is because these songs sound great and they're pretty close to the in game tracks in terms of pacing and such, so they match up with cut scenes and events in-game well. Though perhaps the most important reason I chose to use ZREO's soundtrack is because it's free to download. Anyone can download the soundtrack, convert the music via an application (WAV2MSU) and a batch file I can distribute with my patch and then just have everything work together in the same folder. I could die happy if Blake Robinson did the entire soundtrack to this game so that I could just use that, but then people would have to pay for the soundtrack, and I'd like to have a freely distributable version to go with the patch. The ZREO soundtrack is not complete though, and missing tracks are things such as the Guessing Game House theme which people don't cover very often since they aren't as memorable as, say, the Dark World theme. So not having half the music in the game is a big problem.

Then there's still a handful of programming problems to tackle, with the main one right now being fading the music out. In Zelda 3 when you transition between areas and the game tells the music to change, the SPC code gently fades out the currently playing music for about a second as the screen changes, then the new music kicks in. Since I'm bypassing the SPC almost entirely now, I don't get this and there are sharp transitions between pieces of music as you can see in the above video with the transition from the church to the light world theme or the transition into Kakariko Village towards the end.

Things are looking up

The good news is that all of the above problems are being dealt with. Where the last blog post on this ended in despair and uncertainty, this new one ends with hope.

Byuu, the guy who made bSNES/higan, is pretty active on his own forums so figuring out why the rom plays music in one version of his program and not another is probably just a matter of getting his attention for about five minutes so he can point out what I'm doing wrong. Then I can go and correct it. Even if I can't flag him down though, things are at a point where it works SOMEWHERE which is a lot better than when it didn't work at all anywhere!

A music major friend of mine, Shane Johnson, has agreed to help fill out the soundtrack! So there won't be any sudden silences or shifts to the original soundtrack. This is fantastic news and is much better than my fallback plan (learn to compose).

Finally, I've been trying to get the fade out loop to work with varying degrees of failure. In theory it should be pretty simple, just check to see if we're fading out and if so decrease the volume by a smidge and do this once per frame. The problem is finding the right way to do this without throwing off the rest of the program. For example, I would think that the NMI function would be the place to do this, but when I do, I get something like this:

Which is not ideal. I'm confident that I can fix this if I just spend more time experimenting and studying the code, but it might take a while.

If you know anything about any of this or would like to offer your help in general, please feel free to get in touch with me!