playing roms with custom music?

[c0ldb33r]

Is there any way I can play roms with custom music? What I'm thinking is... wouldn't it be cool to play Super Mario Bros but instead of the regular custom music you just load an mp3 and have that as your music instead.

Are there any emulators that allow you to do this?

BTW, I'm not talking about pirating. Let's keep it with roms of games you actually own and mp3s of music you actually own.

[Viraneth]

Turn off the sound on the emulator and then blast some Amon Amarth, Dimmu Borgir, Suicide Silence, and Dragonforce. Badassesst mario ever.

[skaar]

Yeah, I played the shit out of Shining Force with Prodigy's Fat of the Land as my music.

Of course, this was back when Genesis emus didn't have functional sound ;)

[Viraneth]

XD That sounds awesome.

[Jorpho]

Is there any way I can play roms with custom music? What I'm thinking is... wouldn't it be cool to play Super Mario Bros but instead of the regular custom music you just load an mp3 and have that as your music instead.

Um, "regular custom music"? What "regular custom music"?

I think Viraneth has the right idea as far as turning off the sound in the emulator goes.

The SMB rom has been extensively studied and there are now comprehensive guides as to exactly how the music can be changed. Aside from that, I've heard very little about adding new and different music to a ROM. (Apparently some SMW hacks are now meant to be applied to the Super Mario All-Stars + SMW ROM, since it is then possible for the hack to use the sound engine from the other All-Stars game, but that's about it.)

[c0ldb33r]

Sorry about that, remove the custom from regular custom music.

I'm surprised this feature hasn't been added to either an emulator or to Wii VC titles. To me it's a no brainer. I'd love to listen to my mp3s as the actual soundtrack to the game.

I guess the only option is to disable music in an emulator and just play an mp3.

[Berserker]

Well, can't you disable individual sound channels in certain emulators, such as ZSNES?

Maybe you could just disable all the channels that handle music, play your own in a music player, and that way you could still have sound effects.

I actually think it'd be better that developers didn't bother with officially implementing something like this though, really. I'd rather they focus on emulator functionality than extraneous features.

[jb143]

The emulator developers would have to program in a special case for each game. There's not exactly a PlayMusic function on the old systems. The music then was just data at random locations sent to a sound chip. The emulators would pretty much have to have something like this added...

[bad pseudo code]
if game = SMB and "memory address storing the level"= 1.1 then PlayMusic("SMB1.mp3")
...
[/bad pseudo code]


You'd have to do that for each song in each and every game you'd want to play though.

But it would be possible. If you just wanted 1 or 2 games it could probally be hacked in easily enough if you knew how to do that sorta thing.

Most emulators try to retain the original game as faithfully as possible though. And playing MP3's instead of 8 bit music would kinda go against that.

[Neil Koch]

There is the "Metal MAME" emulator which plays songs by the band Mega Driver in a few games...


I'm surprised this feature hasn't been added to either an emulator or to Wii VC titles. To me it's a no brainer. I'd love to listen to my mp3s as the actual soundtrack to the game.

I'd like to see that on the VC as well (some of those old soundtracks are pretty terrible) but seeing as Nintendo has only put custom soundtracks on a couple of games, I highly doubt they'd do anything in that regard with VC games, and if they did, they'd probably charge extra for those games.

[rbudrick]

For NES you could certainly learn how to hack certain nsf files into NES games or something like that. But yes, your best bet is to get a emulator where you can turn off individual sound channels and then have an nsf player or something playing in the background.

-Rob

[ssjlance]

I know there's the metal MAME* project, but not many game are supported. Although, the Altered Beast on it is worth checking out.

*edit - Sorry, didn't realize I was beaten to the punch. Still, it's all that comes to mind.

[Jorpho]

And of course it's quite trivial to add custom soundtracks to some Sega CD and Playstation games. Sonic CD, for instance.