Sound Effects and Music On Hacking NES Games

[aitsu124]

I'm hacking a few NES ports of arcade games to make them more like their original arcade versions, starting with Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. I have no problem editing their graphics and palettes, but have no idea how to edit their music and, more importantly since they're arcade games, sound effects. I'm not good with hex, the only thing I can do with it is edit palettes, but it appears that it may be the only way to do the music, and I've never heard anything about editing sound effects.

Is this true? I don't need to compose new music, just change the pitch and tone and things like that. Does anyone have any idea how to edit sound effects? They can mostly be the same as the music situation, but it may be helpful if there's a little more freedom for this.

[P]

I just have to ask if you know about the European Red Wii version of Donkey Kong? It has most of the features from the arcade game, but not all.

Regarding sound, there is no standard format for songs or sound effects since everyone are making their own sound engine with their own format for the sound data (of course developers often reuse their engines for later games though).

So you have to first understand how the sound engine works, or at least the sound data format, in order to be able to find it and know what to change to make it sound like you want. Since these games have their NSFs on the internet they must have been figured out by someone (an NSF is basically a ROM-image with only the sound engine and sound data).

You could try asking at Romhacking.net or nesdev.com, for someone that can help you.

[aitsu124]

Yeah, DK Original Edition is the one I'm hacking. I'm also using the European exclusive Mario Bros. Classic Series for MB.

I'll try looking on the web. I'm almost surprised that there isn't a utility that can find out where it is in a game, and then use that to edit in a more user-friendly way on Romhacking.net or Zophar's Domain.

[UglyJoe]

I'm almost surprised that there isn't a utility that can find out where it is in a game, and then use that to edit in a more user-friendly way on Romhacking.net or Zophar's Domain.

Once you figure out how it works, you'll know why there's no such utility

[aitsu124]

Would there be a way to take an arcade NSF, and put it in an NES game, or something along that line?

[UglyJoe]

Would there be a way to take an arcade NSF, and put it in an NES game, or something along that line?

No.  There is no such thing as an "arcade NSF", but I am assuming you mean is it possible to pluck the sound engine and data from an arcade game and drop it into an NES game.  There's no way of doing that, since the DK arcade hardware and the NES hardware are fundamentally different.

[MrNorbert]

Actually... there IS an Arcade to NSF conversion which has like 4 main init cores that emulates MMC5 and VRC6 at the same time.