20 replies to this topic

[moatmai]

After reading a truckload of forum posts, I'm still trying to extract the voice samples from the ROMs of Bride Of Pinbot (BOP) and Funhouse (FH). At first I just wanted to see how it's done, but right now I'm at a stage where it just irritates me that I can't work things out.

Please help me.

I am using the method recommended in http://www.vpforums....u...ail&f_id=36 that is - I am running PinMAME 2.5 and going through the Sound Panel. The problem is that I can't find the sounds I'm looking for. The music is all there and even the Bride's singing, but I can't find any of the speech samples.

In BOP, I have found the bride singing (000b) and the match sound effect (00ca). At first glance, the sound block seems to be limited to the last two bytes, i.e. it goes from 01 to ff. At first glance, that seems to be it: "a6", "a6a6" and "a6a6a6" give you the same sound effect.

By sheer accident (and desperation), I realized that addresses outside that range can produce unique sounds. Play 300e in BOP's sound manager. This doesn't give you what you'd expect, i.e. the same result as 30 (0e is empty, that's why it's perfect to use to explore the higher echelons. Since 00 resets the sound system, 3000 will merely give you a brief noise).

In BOP, 300e instead gives you a brief happy birthday fanfare. This seems to be the one BOP plays when powered up (see http://hem.bredband....Cows&Easter.htm for details). But I'm at a loss of how to locate additional samples, especially the Bride's voice - or Rudy's in FH. Does anybody have any ideas?

I have tried M1, but neither BOP nor FH are supported. I have looked for a tutorial on how to expand the M1.xml file in order to have it run through one sample at a time, but failed here as well. On the other hand, M1 had no problems extracting sound from AFM, MM, SS and TOTAN.

Any insights or help would be much appreciated.

(Is there a place where to post a brief tutorial I'd like to write regarding the ins and outs of how to handle M1 and BridgeM1 for pinball games?)

[CaptainNeo]

I think your best bet is to just rom sound roms and have a speaker mic, record the voice calls manually. That's the way I did my ringmaster voicemail message on my phone.

[moatmai]

I think your best bet is to just rom sound roms and have a speaker mic, record the voice calls manually. That's the way I did my ringmaster voicemail message on my phone.

Thanks for the advice, but that way I'd get the voice with the background music mixed in.

The aim is to get a "clean" version of the voice.

I once had a partial crash of BOP's chips where the music dropped out, but the voices ("We need shuttle launch" "How do I look" etc) still played. I loved that. Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the crash.

[destruk]

You have direct access to the volume channels in pinmame - press ~ (tilde) and then use the arrow keys to go to the volume and sound channel options.
It really is easier to do it that way than to run through the up to 255^16 possibilities in sound commander.

[CaptainNeo]

BOP and FH should have sound test modes in the diagonostics where you can do voice samples as well as music samples seperate. Both are WPC games, so it should work.

[moatmai]

Thank you for all the advice.

I hadn't realized that I can audio mute channels. The approach of using the voice test from diagnostics mode also sounds workable; I will try that first.

However, I was really hoping to uncover more audio easter eggs like the BOP's "Happy Birthday". For instance, I found a nice easter egg in the "Scared Stiff" ROMs by having M1 go through 3000 sample slots. At address 0c2e, Dracula actually says "Eye of the Bony Breast, er, Beast!" I don't believe this sample is ever played within the game.

I see it like digital archeology.

I guess the most promising approach would be to find out how to add my own game entries to M1.xml which would also benefit the community (as it were).

[destruk]

If you find some, you could add them to the sounds.dat file which is included with pinmame. I added all the samples for whitestar II games (LOTR, Sopranos, Elvis, etc etc)

[moatmai]

If you find some, you could add them to the sounds.dat file which is included with pinmame. I added all the samples for whitestar II games (LOTR, Sopranos, Elvis, etc etc)

At this point, I could supply you with lists of samples for AFM, MM and TOTAN. The syntax seems to be simple enough: :Music: is for music, :SFX: is for sound effects and voice samples go into standard quotes ("), right?

Is there anything else I should be aware of? How complete do you want the list to be, i.e. do you want to catalogue every single sound file or just the major music pieces and effects? How do I submit supplementary information?

P.S.: Is the "Move Your Car" sample listed for CFTBL the same as the one heard in the match ball montage of Scared Stiff?

[TheMcD]

Re-using sound bytes was definitely not unheard of, and especially since Scared Stiff's match sequence is supposed to be referencing different pins, the sample being re-used would make perfect sense.

Also, you could add new games to M1? Cor blimey, that would make my job a whole bloody lot easier. I haven't recorded anything for my pinball music emporium in a while apart from those three games I lost the WAVs for when that drive-by virus forced me to reformat. If you could add some more supported stuff into there, that'd be great.

And as for the tutorial: I suppose it would go into the Tutorials section we have. However, I'm not sure if the common user can write something in there. Just write up the tutorial in this thread and I'll repost it in the Tutorials section if necessary.

[destruk]

Anything you want to add to it is fine - as long as the sound commands are accurate for playback in pinmame's sound commander.
The music/sfx, and voice sample quotes are optional (see the end of the file) - it basically needs the sound command and a description of what it is.
As for submitting, send it to one of the pinmame devs with your changes and we'll check it in to be included in the next release, or simply attach it to a thread like this and let us know it's here.

http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?automodu...p;f_id=36\
Complete sample lists are preferred, but if you just know some of them they can be added to/finished later.


And yes, the sound samples for the match animation for Scared Stiff are all from different williams/bally games, randomized.
Much like the multiball music for either striker xtreme or NFL is the same as for Godzilla.

[faralos]

do you mean we can add our own sounds to the roms?
that would be so cool! but doesn't that alter the rom?
would we then have to announce that the sounds in the rom have changed
and it is not the original rom any more?
not that I have this type of expertise but am just curious

[destruk]

no faralos, sounds.dat is simply a text file index of what sounds the roms already have in them. You enter the sound command numbers and they play in sound commander in pinmame.

[moatmai]

Anything you want to add to it is fine - as long as the sound commands are accurate for playback in pinmame's sound commander.
The music/sfx, and voice sample quotes are optional (see the end of the file) - it basically needs the sound command and a description of what it is.
As for submitting, send it to one of the pinmame devs with your changes and we'll check it in to be included in the next release, or simply attach it to a thread like this and let us know it's here.

http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?automodu...p;f_id=36\
Complete sample lists are preferred, but if you just know some of them they can be added to/finished later.

So. I went through all the samples I collected from Attack from Mars using M1 and checked them against the addresses in PinMAME. There are, gulp, 575 valid sample offsets as far as I could check. After sample #800 (0320 hex) the sounds start to repeat themselves, though. Many samples are duplicated. I stopped checking after going through approximately 1500 samples. Cataloguing the samples and typing the titles into a spreadsheet took me several hours. Many of the sound effects were hard to categorize, so I simply described the sound where I wasn't sure ("Laser fire" etc.).

Would you like me to reformat the spreadsheet data into the sounds.dat format or do you prefer the raw spreadsheet data? The spreadsheet data includes an additional column which maps the vocal samples to the characters (General, Martian, Frenchman, British Woman etc). Also: Are there any reserved characters one shall not use in sounds.dat descriptions?

[destruk]

I don't think there are character reservations aside from the : colon.
You can test it out by copying it into sounds.dat, quitting, and then running pinmame and pressing F4 to enter sound command mode when the game starts up. Pressing the up and down arrow keys scroll through the entries and space plays.
I'd prefer them to be in the sounds.dat file already with the standard format to be most descriptive, but that's just my preference - the big deal is the sound command number and something for a description.

[moatmai]

I don't think there are character reservations aside from the : colon.
You can test it out by copying it into sounds.dat, quitting, and then running pinmame and pressing F4 to enter sound command mode when the game starts up.

Will do.

I'd prefer them to be in the sounds.dat file already with the standard format to be most descriptive, but that's just my preference - the big deal is the sound command number and something for a description.

Should I filter out the duplicates or leave them in?

[destruk]

I'd leave duplicates in, because we don't know which commands the game actually uses to play the specific sound. Thanks!

[moatmai]

Okay, I created a sounds.dat compatible list of all sounds and uploaded it to pastebin since I didn't see a way to upload the file to vpforums.

http://pastebin.com/AKJad64M

destruk, could you please check the file? When I appended it to the sounds.dat of pinmame, the titles did show up, but there were some oddities: Some samples don't show up in the simulator, others are out of sequence.

To see what I mean, add the contents of the pastebin to the end of your sounds.dat, save it and run pinmame.exe. Hit F4 to access sound command mode and go up to 0009. You will find that between 0009 and 0010 there is an entry "Duck low" which should be at 00FE instead.

Could you please give me any clues to why this is happening?

[destruk]

The sound command letters need to be in lower case.
So this
:000A:Music: Martian Attack 2

needs to be
:000a:Music: Martian Attack 2

and then it will work correctly.
attached changed file

Attached Files

•  sounds.zip   42.31KB   13 downloads

Edited by destruk, 07 August 2012 - 07:04 PM.

[Jet082]

Sorry for digging this thread back up, but I'm also looking to get the voice samples for BOP (to be used in the FuturePinball's version of the table).  I've been unable to find where the voice samples are using the sound manager.  Unfortunately, the test menu only gives about 15 samples, with only 5 of those samples being voices.

 

I tried using the sound manager in combination with the test menu to help me figure out where the voice tracks are.  If the test menu plays a song, the rightmost value in "last commands" relates to the hex value of the song itself in sound manager.  However, the voice tracks don't seem to follow that logic.  The only difference I see between a voice track and a sound effect/song is that the voice track has a "7a" before it.  However, I have no idea how to use this - I've tried every combination of the voice track value (say "11" for "How do I look?") and 7a and still was unable to play the voice track with the sound manager.

 

However, I haven't been completely unsuccessful.  I can make the voice track play, but only by accident.  I've placed these values in the rightmost area of the sound manager "7a 11", which is related to "How do I look?".  In the area to the left of it, I placed the value "d7" which is the bride singing.  When the singing is playing I quickly switched the "d7" to a "da", which is some other sound effect.  However, if I do it just right, I'll hear "How do I look?" along with the sound effect in place of the singing.  I feel like I'm on to something, but I'm a novice when it comes to this.

 

Using the tilde (~) menu to change the volume to different sound channels, I was able to mute the sound effect by not the voice tracks.  I can then do the above without hearing the sound effect (but I still hear the singing first of course).  It's a partial solution, but it still requires heavy work with an outside program to cut out the singing.  I feel like there should be a way to easily play the voice track without having to make it accidentally play.

 

Any other ideas?

Edited by Jet082, 09 December 2012 - 08:01 PM.

[faralos]

since these are commercial pins aren't the voice samples buried in with the bookkeeping?

I thought when you went through the tests (solenoid, lights, etc)

there was one for voices or sound effects too

I don't own a 'talking' pin so I have no clue but it would seem logical