SMB music editor?

[PetMetroid]

Is there a SMB music editor out there? I can't do hex, too confusing. If I like watched a video on how to use hex, I could probably know how to use it. Anyway, I believe that it's possible to create a music editor, since (just an idea) level editors are programs with different options which change specific codes for specific games. I have proof, too: somebody is making a metroid music editor right now. An easier way to learn hexing, I'll say, "thanx teach!"<img src=smilies/magbiggrin.gif>

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[Ugly Joe]

> Is there a SMB music editor out there?

Nope. Not that I've seen, anyway. Also, a level editor and music editor would be way different. Most nes games have their levels laid out in tiles, meaning somewhere in the rom there is some code that is laying out a sequence of tiles. A level editor can change that sequence. I'm not sure how a music editor would even work. A music extractor/inserter would make more sense, since if you know the location of a song, you could replace it with a song of the same size (or smaller with some padding). Even then, I doubt it would be as simple as replacing the code in the rom. So, possible, yes. Available, no.<P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by Ugly Joe on 08/29/04 06:33 PM.</FONT></P>

[PetMetroid]

> > Is there a SMB music editor out there?
>
> Nope. Not that I've seen, anyway.
>
Is that hard to make?

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[Ugly Joe]

> Is that hard to make?
>
note: I just edited my first post, be sure to read that.

Yes, a music editor would be quite hard to make. The music isn't just a sequence of notes. I'm sure someone else can explain it better than me (since I've only glanced at the asm needed to play music), but I know a music editor would be difficult to make.

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[Sliver X]

For the most part, most NES games use entirely different "engines" to produce sounds in games; the code has to define how the waves generated are shaped (Pitch, duration, etc), looping instructions, note locations, etc, and there's thousands of ways to program methods of doing that. So music isn't even close to being universal like graphics tiles are.

Editing music is quite possible, however, and believe it or not, the easiest way is to use hex (Barring the lack of a music editor, of which there are none that I know of). Knowing assembly can let you track down locations of music data quickly, but plain ol' corruption and experimentation can get it done as well (Hacking an NSF rip of a game is a tremendous help, since it's almost a verbatim dump of the music code in a game).

I've hacked the music in close to ten NES games, and with few exceptions* all of them were totally different in the ways they worked.
One of them was SMB1, in fact, and I have to tell you that it has the most frustrating format I've ever dealt with. I couldn't pull anything off in that ROM, since small changes would produce highly erratic results, sometimes even crashing the game itself. SMB2 and 3 have much more hacker-friendly formats to work with.

Anyway, I wrote a very half assed document explaining how I hack music years ago, which is http://sliverx.panicus.org/RH/nesmusic.txthere.</A>
Hope it's decent for a little insight.







*Games made by the same company tend to have very similar "engines", like early Konami and Capcom games. I presume that if the sound coding for different games was done by the same person, they simply reused their previous code instead of making a new one from scratch.

[Gil-Galad]

There is a Super Mario Bros 1 music hacking document on http://www.romhacking.com/ and it's by Necrosaro. Like Sliver-X said you will have a hell of a time changing the music because you will almost always get unstable results.

There is a hack of SMB1 that's called SMBXXX or something like that, that has hacked music that sounds good.

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