I added preliminary sound and music to Joe and Mac Returns. Absolutely amazing work on that and the other 156 games by Haze!

It turns out the world’s roller coasters aren’t going to ride themselves, so we either had to do the next Audio Overload release now or in a few weeks when Richard would next be done making himself puke. That means PSF2 didn’t make it – given this update’s focus on quality I didn’t want to send out a half-finished driver. Anyhow…

Audio Overload 2.0b5a6 will be released shortly on the usual place. This version supports the same 21 file formats as last time, but with many fine improvements:

• Completely replaced the .NSF, .GBS, and .SNDH engines with substantially better-sounding and more-compatible versions. Big thanks to Shay Green (.NSF and .GBS based on Game Music Box) and Benjamin Gerard (.SNDH based on the upcoming SC68 v2.3.0) for allowing us to use their code!
• CAB archive support. This is popular in Japan and many Japanese formats (such as .S98) are commonly found in these containers.
• Fixed MOD note delay and note cut behavior.
• Added support for the S3M note cut effect.
• Fixed bug in the new RAR engine that caused crashes on some files.
• Fixed .RAW files that use a timer divider of 0.
• Fixed tempo of .QSF files.
• Fixed .S98 files using a tempo value other than the default.
• Fixed nasty pop/click at the start of .S98 files.

AO’s not quite reference-quality on all formats yet (in particular .GSF needs work) but certainly this version is the most listenable to date, and you can now do it on 4 platforms: Mac OS X, Windows, x86 Linux, and x86-64 Linux. (Yes, that’s a full native 64-bit binary! Built on Fedora Core 3 x86-64).

A plea to folks ripping music in the various program+data formats (especially PSF and friends): follow the specs! smf already detailed issues with the .PSF rip of Chocobo’s Dungeon 2 (it had a MIPS code sequence that’s illegal on the real PSX CPU, and AO patches it) so I won’t go into that again here.

Our next, err, victim is the .PSF2 rip of Shadow Hearts, which commits multiple crimes. First up, it hard-codes the file I/O prefix as “hefile:/” instead of extracting it from the argv/argc passed in. Neill Corlett’s own PSF2 specs say you should *never* hardcode the prefix, because it’ll be different in different players. I use “aofile:/” in Audio Overload, for instance. With that worked around we hit the second and much more evil problem: the rip calls IOP kernel services to dynamically allocate memory, but elsewhere those addresses are hardcoded (for the benefit of anyone else trying to write a PSF2 player, the big allocation goes at 0x80060000 and the smaller one at 0x80170000). It wouldn’t have been much more work to pass the allocated addresses down in the RPC parameter block, but no such luck. So I put in an extra-special hack for that game and got it playing.

Note that I’m not writing this to “call out” the rippers – they do a lot of great work, and I specifically am not mentioning who made the rips in question because it’s not about that at all. This is simply a cautionary tale to would-be rippers to be careful out there and try your new rips in other players – for .PSF, try SexyPSF and Audio Overload. For PSF2 try the next version of Audio Overload when it’s released.