Ashguine Story 2 - translation and music patches

That's a very interesting way of translation: not only translating the text, but also the music! Anyways, impressive job, kudos!

Holy cow!

I imagine the work it was!

Btw, I saw DRAGON SLAYER 4 in which is funny since here on Brazil it was always in english.

respect!

Hm, that's an interesting idea, porting/hacking in the music from other platforms! Not sure if that's doable tho. Then again, I'm no MSX coder

Yes, no need to compose them again... coders should comment viability....

Oh! This is wonderful news! I'm a big fan of FM music, so this is a big upgrade over the PSG version. In the future I'm also hoping for a version of Ys III, but in the meantime I'm going to enjoy this big time. Thanks!

Just a pity that the in game musics are very short tracks, just a hand full of seconds each. Thanks to the FM-PAC demo, a style didn't have to be made up. I just took that style for the rest of the soundtrack.
The end demo had to be completely rearranged with totally different chords because the original was dreadfully false
It was a very nice job and I like the responses a lot... Thanks...

Excellent job! Thank you!

Here's a start (very Work In Progress).
http://youtu.be/tSYJGKDyZmg
But you'd need the music data and a way to convert it to do the entire soundtrack. Or lock someone up with an MSX. :)

Looks fantastic! : ) Always glad to see more work from the MSX Translations group. I'd like to play it soon, but I was trying to finish Ashguine 1 first before I play through the second game. The first game has been been difficult so far since it takes so very long to grind and avoid enemies until you can defeat them, and your attacks change making it all the more difficult to hit enemies... that and it's a absolute maze from what I can tell. I just got some kind of orb by going backwards and then promptly lost the remainder of my Life Points. Was the first game ever translated?

-Thomas

@ John Hassink: Very nice arrangement. I feel like start ripping YS3

Thanks! So, it's possible to extrahere the music data out of the game? I guess the hardest part would be to convert the 'notes' into an MBM track.

About Ashguine, which ones are Story 1 and Story 3? I much enjoyed the Micro Cabin one, but that of ASCII, not really.

EDIT: I credited it to ASCII, but it was actually Bit2, right?

Thanks Max and Co! Max - how's SD Snatcher progressing?

Still, that comes down to re-arranging by ear. Even if you could listen to channels separately, and even if you were able to manually slow down re-play, that'd be too much work (in this particular case) for one (or even two/three) human being(s). For example, that single Varestine Castle arrangement was created in roughly 5 days, and it's not even finished.

I'd like to propose a more useful idea (IMHO) then, but it's paired to an important question.
The question: is music data used in games (or particularly Ys III) usually 'compressed' in the sense that we can't speak anymore of a 'step' like structure but only 'raw' frequency/noise/envelope commands on interrupt, or are there remnants of the music program/MML used to create the music which indicate a clear 'raster' or matrix in which the events happen (maybe this can actually be calculated along the relative interrupt cycles but I'm not a programmer, so.. )?
Anyway, in the latter case, even a simple graphical depiction of the actual 'notes' (frequencies) and their individual lengths (!) would make the entire process a whooooole lot easier. Like, factor 100.000 or so. Well, you'd feel like a data typist at an office booth, but it's still a lot less tiring than doing the entire thing by ear alone.

Even if you manage to make a program that, just through some cross-development application, p00ps out a .txt file which shows the exact notes (or calculated by frequency), I think I can speak for any music creator when I say that this is to be preferred way over just a replayer. Although one with separate channel on/off and slowing down, or even rewind/fast forward/pause functions would be a very handy tool to aid in the conversion.

Then you got the 'notes' at least. The real 'fun' begins in making it sound 'credible' on FM and especially - working around Moonblaster's limitations. On top of that; in the case of Falcom MSX PSG music, an arranger would have to listen very closely to other ports (NES, SNES, etc. but PC-88 and Sega Genesis in particular) to find out how the music was meant by the composer, since the MSX versions are just 3-channel renditions of originally more elaborate songs.

Yup, it was the general sludginess (not to mention the bad control response) which threw me off very early in the game. Interested about the interesting elements.
Story III is no Xak but still a very fun action RPG, in my opinion.

@Johnhassink: ..ehm, but Falcom sell Ys games for PC with the original MIDI Sound Track inside of DVD. For e.g. YS 1&2 Eternal have them!! Many original MIDI files are online: they are usefull to get notes and make a conversion for MSX.

Yes!
But then you have a MID file and there's Moonblaster who doesn't know what *that* is...
And I can imagine that if there's a MID2MBM.COM the notes will be scattered allover the channels...

Great work!!! Thank you so much!

The MSX-Audio and MSX-Music + MSX-Audio patches (without digital drums) even work just fine on the OPL3 cartridge and on MoonSound, when those are configured to the C0h port.

@max_iwamoto

I have the complete YS3 soundtrack for FM+SCC+PSG, in MGS format. I don't know for sure who made it (some japanese guy), but it's just wonderful/eye tearing.

It was on my plans to tackle on YS3, turbofixing it, porting to harddisk, adding this FM-Music soundtrack, fixing the game to pass the MSX AcidTests, and adding OPL3/4 support. But unfortunately I don't have enough free time anymore.

If you want to, I can send this YS3 MGS soundtrack to you.

Part of grauw's plans for the program in the future is detect what is available and redirect chip-compatible data streams accordingly, based on what is installed/available. I mean, knowing that OPL, OPL2 and FM only MSX-Audio data can be played on the Moonsound, just dynamically redirect it. I got this info from talking to him on openMSX IRC channel.

So, eventually no C4 to C0 switching will be required.

edit:wat ? I thought I was comenting into VGMplay release thread.
email link stuff might be borked

Yeah I noticed too. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Oh, that's handy. The stages get quite complicated early on.

The link is broken but I found the A2ENG100.RAR archive on a other site.
Great renovation !

We moved msxfiles.com to new domain - msxtranslations.com

msxfiles.com is back online to ensure compatibility with links to it from other websites. And it will automatically re-direct you to msxtranslations.com as well.

But if you adding a new link to your website, please use msxtranslations.com from now on.

@ Meits: I hope so