Here's a little Christmas present for Mario fans...
I replaced the music of Super Mario Bros with well fitting counterparts from Super Paper Mario. All the sound effects are intact.*
It was an entertaining scripting & hacking challenge.
https://files.tasvideos.org/smb1-tas-klmz-remastered-audio.avi (7.7 MB)
EDIT: Updated, to give more coverage of the songs
*) I would have replaced the sound effects too, but there were simply too many... I don't have that kind of sound bank.
Would like to do, but unfortunately I don't have a ROM disassembler that can cope with MMC3 mapper used by SMB3.
I'm trying to write one though :)
EDIT: I can actually do this for SMB3, in theory, too. I got the workings right. (It really helps that SMB3 is an upgrade to SMB1 instead of a complete rewrite.) However, it is now a matter of finding an interesting movie and hoping that it syncs even with the hacked ROM.
Allright, here's one for SMB3.
Fitting songs from Super Mario Galaxy to SMB3 was a lot more difficult than Super Paper Mario to SMB1. In two cases (first stage and death ditty), I gave up and used the sounds from Super Mario All-Stars instead.
The stage ending ditty is from Galaxy, but it could be better.
https://files.tasvideos.org/bisqwit/smb3-demo-remastered-audio.avi (11 MB)
With this ROM hack, Genisto's SMB3 movie desynched after acquiring the first flute, so I created my own playaround movie instead of using his performance. Enjoy.
Do not use Internet terrorism programs such as Flashget or Download accelerators (or in your case, CFNetwork/129.22), and you will download the file(s) just fine.
Hee, internet terrorism. It could just be that it's 5AM and I'm still awake, but that made me laugh. Though I suppose if I had reason to be concerned about server load I would have the same opinion.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I don't get it. You made a program/script that plays music synced to the game's programming? Because the NES doesn't support that sound quality, so I'm guessing that's what it is.
That gives ideas... What if you made a "mod" of a nes game with high res graphics, high quality sound/music but what you're actually doing is playing the game on an emulator under the scenes? I guess it would require complete deassembly of the game eh? Just a dream then.
Yes. I patched the game so as to not output music (while still outputting sound effects), and patched the emulator to report me whenever the game would want to switch music tracks, and then just created a script to time the music tracks to the timing information reported by the emulator.
Theoretically doable, just requires a lot of effort and no fear of being disdained as "no life".
The emulator portion could be done entirely with RAM watches combined with timing information; a separate program would reconstruct the entire performance from that information.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
The music alone was very cool, so maybe what you did could be ported as game-especific to an emulator? You would load the game's rom and then go to a drop down menu and choose "Arranged soundtrack" which will be available because the game supports this feature (each game needs to be added to the code, of course), and then it would read from a separate folder with the ogg files.
With all the graphics enhancers going about I don't think that most emulators are just for playing the old systems as faithfully as possible, so I think this kind of thing would be very welcome.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
What about if all the program did was read the tiles output from the emulator and reconstruct it on a higher resolution image, placing each substitute higher res tile on the equivalent position? Is that doable? It would require these things:
- a program that can read the tiles being output by the emulator to the emulator video out
- the program must understand the uniqueness of each tile, so as to use a corresponding tile from a high res library
- the program must output the tiles on a high res screen, on the corresponding position as shown in the emulator output video.
- make the high res graphics for all tiles in the game
What can be done with this:
1 - high res graphics (or pre-rendered 3d graphics)
2 - animated tiles where it used to be static (water surface, for example)
3 - new materials? metal and glass that's actually shiny, tiles that are partly transparent, etc.
4 - especial effects created whenever a particular tile appears or disappears. example when score appears on the screen in super mario bros 3 "100" or "200" can be substituted for something bigger and flashier and animated. This one may be hard or impossible to implement by only reading the tile output data, but can be tested.
I'm thinking super mario bros 3 here, but maybe it can be tested on something simpler like Mario Bros.
It's a lot of work but I'm up to doing all the graphics. Now if anyone is interested in doing the programming or pointing anything I didn't notice that would make it more difficult or impracticable, you're welcome.
edit: Just found this: http://savygamer.blogspot.com/2008/04/sonic-2-hd-fan-remake-on-way.html
The result I want is similar to it