#Ghosts ’n Goblins music converter & player

Copyright 2020 Laurens Holst

#Project information

• Author: Laurens Holst laurens@grauw.nl
• Source: https://hg.sr.ht/~grauw/gngplay
• License: Simplified BSD License

Converts the Ghosts ’n Goblins arcade music in VGM format to a data stream suitable for play back on Yamaha SFG, Neotron or Makoto. The format aims to be both efficient for playback and small in size. Due to a compact representation for the most frequent event types to reduce the individual tracks are all below 8K and the total size is less than 64K.

#System requirements

• MSX, MSX2, MSX2+ or MSX turboR
• 64K main RAM
• 16K video RAM
• MSX-DOS

If the replayer core and music data is embedded in a ROM, the RAM requirement is lowered to 16K and the MSX-DOS requirement is dropped.

#Converter functions

The converter has the following functions:

• Compact data format
• Simple playback on three sound chips
• Coalescing instrument settings per channel
• Grouping into five event types (key, frequency, instrument, wait, loop)
• Clock frequency conversion
• Channel remapping
• Small wait removal
• Timing quantisation
• Trimming of leading silence
• Moving frequency events before key on
• Volume adjustment

It also outputs VGM files for the YM2151 OPM and YM2610 OPN for easy testing with VGMPlay and debugging with vgm2txt.

#Music data format

The data format consists of five types of events:

• 00-7F: Key on / off event. Bit 0-2: channel, bit 3-6: slots.
• 80-87: Note frequency event. Bit 0-2: channel, byte 1-2: OPM frequency, byte 3-4: OPN frequency.
• 88-8F: Instrument settings. Bit 0-2: channel, byte 1-25: slot parameters, byte 26: feedback / algorithm.
• 90: Loop offset. Bytes 1-2: offset to loop point.
• 91-FF: Wait. n - 90H: nr. of 60Hz ticks.

#Additional notes

The arcade game music uses two OPNs clocked at 1.5 MHz. But because it sets the prescaler to a frequency divider of 3 instead of the usual 6, they act like OPNs clocked at 3 MHz with the default prescaling.

The game sets the frequency after it sets key on. Due to this you sometimes get a wrong note at the start of a track on real hardware, depending on the initial values. This was probably a bug in the original game’s replayer code which did not get exposed during normal play. A processing step was added to put frequency in front of the key on commands.

Track 01 is the same as Track 27, but with two channels muted. It is recommended to use track 27 instead of track 01.

#Usage instructions

Extract the Ghosts ’n Goblins arcade VGM pack, rename the .vgz files to .vgm.gz and extract each of them again, and then put them in the res/ directory. It is recommended to re-loop track 24 so that it becomes smaller and the loop sounds better. Use vgm_trim with parameters start: 0, loop: 35111, end: 364391.

The resources.json file in the res directory contains a manifest of the files to convert and various settings.

Then, on macOS and Linux execute the make command to convert the files and compile the replayer. Test by putting the MSX-DOS system files in the bin/ directory and executing the make run command. OpenMSX 0.16.0 or later is required, it currently only supports the Yamaha SFG sound chip.

On Windows, execute the build commands from the Makefile manually.

Note that the glass assembler which is embedded in the project requires Java 8. To check your Java version, invoke the java -version command.

Additionally, the conversion tools are written in JavaScript for Node.js. You need to have Node.js and NPM installed.