Lost song discovered in Japanese CT

[JLukas]

A new lost song has been discovered in the Japanese version of CT.  It is around 15 seconds long and appears to be a "Fanfare" type music.

Unfortunately, while the song survived, the instrument table used for it did not.

To hear this, simply enter the 3 below codes (Japanese version only) and be standing inside Truce on the 1000 AD map.  It'll stop the town theme and begin with the song.  By default, it is using the "Determination" instruments.  These are not the correct ones, but will still give you a general idea of what it sounds like.  You can enter the second instrument set codes to try and correct the table.  This is basically the same thing the instrument editor in Temporal Flux does.  xx is a value from 00 to 3F.  It seems the song only uses Instrument 0-5 but I included 6-A just in case.  None of the other songs use more than that.

7E1B9C50 - Playsong 50 on OW
C70E0876 - Pointer byte 1
C70E09EB - Pointer byte 2

C7180Bxx - Instrument 0
C7180Dxx - Instrument 1
C7180Fxx - Instrument 2
C71811xx - Instrument 3
C71813xx - Instrument 4
C71815xx - Instrument 5
C71817xx - Instrument 6
C71819xx - Instrument 7
C7181Bxx - Instrument 8
C7181Dxx - Instrument 9
C7181Fxx - Instrument A

That is obviously a HUGE amount of combinations.  We may never know what it truly sounded like, but it should be possible to get a fairly close match.  Please post any interesting combinations you may find.

[ZeaLitY]

I encourage everyone to experiment. This is pretty newsworthy, and we can make an .spc available after we find a good combination.

[justin3009]

Amazing...It sound's like a "Hurry Up!" Theme type.  Or a "Escape" them.  Pretty strange.  Nice job on finding that.

[Asuyuka]

I think this was heard on the Chrono Trigger PSX Soundtest... I can't remember the song.  Either that, or its one very similar and my mind's going bonkers.

I'd check, except for the card with my CT data is currently missing. x.o

--

Nevermind, took another listen (and, I entered in codes wrong).  Forget the post. x.x;

[ZeaLitY]

Well, we aren't having much luck with submissions, so I guess I'll try something later.

[justin3009]

I'll probably post something sooner or later after I've found a combination I like.

[ZeaLitY]

C7180Bxx - Instrument 0

This controls the lead-in instrument that repeats itself several times before the main fanfare.

C7180Dxx - Instrument 1

This controls the main lead instrument, which hits three notes before the second instrument kicks in per every repition of the song.

C7180Fxx - Instrument 2

And this is the second instrument that comes in after the main lead, with a little jingle of sorts.

C71811xx - Instrument 3

This *might* be the huge drum sound, but changing instruments doesn't seem to affect it.

C71813xx - Instrument 4

This is the bass riff that plays in the background at high speed.

C71815xx - Instrument 5

Changing instruments doesn't seem to affect this. Here is my SPC:

http://cc.herograw.org/Zeality/Unknown2.spc

C7180B24 - Instrument 0
C7180D22 - Instrument 1
C7180F29 - Instrument 2
C718112C - Instrument 3
C7181333 - Instrument 4
C718152F - Instrument 5

[JLukas]

^ Nice work, that's a lot better than what I was able to come up with (which didn't sound too different from the original Determination instruments)

[Reld]

Time for some good ol' thread necromancy! I have no idea if this topic was further hashed out elsewhere, so if it was I apologize.

So, part of the reason this song sounds so messed up is that it's missing its "drum table". Chrono Trigger's sound driver has a "drum mode" where different instruments can be tied to specific notes, which makes it so that you don't have to fill the track data up with commands for changing instruments back and forth between notes. There's a "drum table" for each song that defines what instrument to play and at which note/octave. ...I feel like I'm explaining this very poorly.

Basically the table might look something like this:
C = Instrument 0x25, Octave 5, Note G
C# = Instrument 0x23, Octave 6, Note C
and so on...

This would mean that in "drum mode" whenever a C is played it will switch to instrument 0x25 and play a G5 note, and when a C# is played it will switch to instrument 0x23 and play a C6 note. It's used to easily switch back and forth between drum instruments (kick, snare, hi-hat, whatever) within the same track/channel.

Anyway, I put together a drum table for the song and fiddled with the instrument choices some and I think I got a pretty good result. It's still speculative (and will probably always be unless some proto gets found and dumped with this track intact), but you can hear parts of the song now that you simply couldn't before.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

Any recommendations on opening .spc files? Extension or program?

[Reld]

I like SPC700 Player. There's also the SNESamp plugin for Winamp, which is convenient if you already use Winamp.

[Mauron]

Do you have more notes on the data in this drum mode? The data is located in the ROM, but we don't have much for interpreting it.

[Reld]

Drum table starts at $071871 in the ROM
83 elements (one for each song, even if it's not used), 36 bytes each

Each drum table has twelve 3-byte entries that correspond to the notes C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B. This is the note that will trigger the instrument change in "drum mode".

The first byte in each entry is the instrument to use. It's the index of the instrument in the current song's instrument table, not the index of the instrument in the ROM. So valid entries are $20 through $2F.
(Actually, you could probably use the lower values that correspond to sound effect instruments as well, but I haven't tried it or noticed it being done in the existing songs.)

The second byte is the note and octave to actually be played. The values look like this:

Code: [Select]

$00 = Octave 0, C
$01 = Octave 0, C#
$02 = Octave 0, D
$03 = Octave 0, D#
$04 = Octave 0, E
$05 = Octave 0, F
$06 = Octave 0, F#
$07 = Octave 0, G
$08 = Octave 0, G#
$09 = Octave 0, A
$0A = Octave 0, A#
$0B = Octave 0, B
$0C = Octave 1, C
$0D = Octave 1, C#
This pattern continues on for all octaves up through...
$6E = Octave 9, D
$6F = Octave 9, D#
$70 = Octave 9, E
$71 = Octave 9, F
$72 = Octave 9, F#
$73 = Octave 9, G
$74 = Octave 9, G#
$75 = Octave 9, A
$76 = Octave 9, A#
$77 = Octave 9, BI don't know what happens if you put in higher values. Haven't tried it.

The third byte is the volume panning to play the note at.

Within the track data drum mode is switched on with command $FB, and switched off with command $FC.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the default values for unused table elements are all zeroes.

[Mauron]

Starting at $C705E0, the data is sent to the APU when the song is loaded. Unfortunately I haven't done enough SPC-700 debugging to get much from that point on.

I'll make sure to stick this in the encyclopedia later.

[ZeaLitY]

This thread makes me wonder JLukas is up to these days.

Awesome work! I'll need to update the Chrono Trigger SPC archive for the next update, and announce.

The Sonic 1 prototype finally being found has me still wistfully wishing that the V-Jump alpha would get leaked.