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Messages - insidious611

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1
Just posting to update that there's been a new release. Nothing monumental, a workaround for an issue with music resuming on the SD2SNES as well as a number of major fixes to the installer. Presets are now also available as packs for direct download.

Check here for more details.

2
Unfortunately that would only be possible if we could save the loop points for each track and add them back on, as well as preserve the edits in the .PCMs.

It's doable, but it'd be a lot of extra work at this point.

Also, the artist of the one source of music that's still being actively sold (Sean Schafianski) only endorsed us using it in its current format. I have a feeling he would object to us providing the songs in an easily-listenable standard audio format like FLAC.

It still might be something worth investigating going forwards.

---

Unrelatedly, I've also had some disturbing reports of issues running the installer on Linux that I am completely unable to track down. I don't use Linux everyday anymore, but on the Linux install I do have, I have no issues at all running the installer using the instructions provided on my GitHub page. So if there are any Linux users here that can provide me with more idea of what's going on and why I can't reproduce this issue, I'd appreciate it. See:

https://github.com/Insidious611/DancingMadFF6/issues/95

As well as a comment on one of our old YouTube videos mentioning a similar problem and a few reports on Discord.

Frankly, since my codebase hasn't changed, I'm kind of wanting to point the finger at Qt having changed something.

I'm looking at graduating from the CS degree that's held me back from contributing to this project for a while some time in October. At that point, I'm going to put nose to the grindstone and fix as many of the currently remaining bugs (including, hopefully, this Linux one) as I can.

Full disclosure however, after nearly 6-7 years of mostly bug-hunting I'm growing a little tired of this project and am kind of in the market for a permanent maintainer, someone with at least a passing knowledge of 65816 assembly and Python 3 and who is willing to deep-dive into the code without too much in the way of instruction.

---

As a final update, all mirrors (except for the third party mirror at the bottom of mirrors.dat) should be up and working again. If you are having issues downloading PCMs please try redownloading the installer. I'm trying to get an update out to the installer that will pull mirrors.dat from GitHub so that it updates the mirror list automatically, for now the mirror list is bundled with the download.

3
Without a log file or more data I can't answer your question. It downloads the audio files just fine for me and everyone else.

Regarding "Downloading the songs elsewhere" That's a question I've answered about 100 times and am not going to answer again, except to say "No."

There is not one set of audio files. There are a total of 6 sets in various states of completeness.

Confirming that as of testing right this very moment PCM download seems to be working. I've had a more detailed (and helpful) report of some issues with Opera track downloading and it hasn't gotten that far yet, so we'll see.

EDIT: Confirmed, PCM downloading should be working fine ATM with the latest version of the installer. If you're having issues, please make sure you're not using an older version of the installer.

Also, please note that the PCM files are hosted in Europe and I've been noticing some issues with lag over the transatlantic cables since the whole Quarantine thing started. And my installer doesn't really show you "Waiting for reply.." or anything like that you might be used to from a web browser. So if it seems like it's stalling during the install, just be patient. It will connect eventually (within ~10 seconds or so) and once it connects the download should be smooth.

4
One final note, thinking more about the issue presented above.

I don't generally want to provide a "full download" installer of Dancing Mad because of the sheer size of it. But, I could do so, and have the installer pick from local data. It would be similar in download size to downloading a modern AAA game from Steam or something like that, and most of the data would end up useless to you unless you're testing multiple different soundtracks.

However, as long as I put this copy of the mod *only* on the dedicated servers/VPSes I pay for every month (the first two mirrors.dat entries), my bandwidth cap with these services is so high that I could sustain thousands of downloads of this "complete" pack without being charged extra. So it would be no skin off my back, and there would be no reason to discontinue the "online" version of the installer.

This would also mean that there would be a copy of the installer that could be mirrored elsewhere by others in case my servers ever go down or the project ends up completely abandoned.

That said, I don't want to do this unless there's interest, because among other things I'm going to have to assemble this copy locally and upload it, and uploading such a large archive on my residential cable connection is going to take a long time and saturate bandwidth in a house with 6 other people.




So, I'm putting this question to my users. Would you be interested in an offline installer?

5
Regarding the idea of putting the PCMs on Google Drive or Mega, to put it shortly: Hell No.


To put it in long form:

1. I already have backups.
The installer already sources from a list of three different mirrors, two of them hosted by myself with four-9s uptime for the past two years, and one of them an Amazon S3 bucket which is served through a CloudFront CDN. If the installer is having issues downloading PCMs, I guarantee you it is due to a bug in the installer or an issue with your internet connection, not an issue with availability of the download servers. If you continue to have this issue, as I advise people to do with an issues to do with the installer, it would be useful to me for you to open up an issue on GitHub and include the "dancing-mad-installer.log" file, which you should find in your user directory. (C:\Users\yourusername on windows)

Notably, it should be impossible, if the installer is functioning properly, for the download to stall out for two hours like you mention happening. The download system has multiple baked in hard timeouts intended to make failing over from one mirror to another painless. I'm not saying this isn't happening to you, what I'm saying is that if it is, it's not a download issue but an issue with my installer which needs to be properly debugged.

In addition to the three mirrors of the PCMs the installer uses, I maintain my own backups of all data related to the project both locally on multiple hard drives and bluray discs, as well as privately on cloud storage providers, like but not including the ones mentioned.

Backups are indeed a good idea. I already have them.

2. With few exceptions, I do NOT want people downloading the PCMs outside of the installer.

This is for multiple reasons. Most importantly, it's because anyone asking for these is generally vastly underestimating how much data they're asking for and how much time it's going to take them to sort it themselves. This is not like your garden variety MSU-1 pack where there is a single set of PCMs to handle. You are talking about more data than either of your suggested providers allow any one person to upload for free, and I don't see anyone offering to pay for the hosting. And the PCMs are not labeled in a friendly way or sorted by track numbers on the OST or any other way that makes them easy for someone to handle themselves. They are sorted by source name and internal track number, the latter of which you're only going to know if you read my data files or are familiar with hacking FF6 yourself.

Why do I mention this? Because uploading to mega.nz or google drive, in addition to aforementioned "you're literally asking me to pay more money than I'm already paying to host this", means asking people to download the PCMs themselves. Automating downloads from services like mega or gdrive that are *designed* to *foil* attempts to automate downloading from them is chasing a moving target.

Curious as to what my exceptions are? If you plan to help out the project and want to look over or edit the PCMs yourself, or are planning on setting up your own mirror (something I don't have a problem with as long as it's on a service that allows unrestricted HTTP GETs following the same folder structure. Just use wget -m or something), those are perfectly good reasons to download the PCMs yourself without the installer. But please, don't do it if you just want to play the mod.



A final note. As a quick fix, if the installer is failing to properly switch over from one mirror to another in the case of a failed download, or the default mirror is simply too slow, I suggest the following process:

1. Extract the installer to a folder
The installer is packaged in a 7-zip self extracting executable format. You can extract the installer with 7-zip by opening the EXE file as an archive.

2. Open "mirrors.dat" with notepad or your preferred text editor of choice
Mirrors.dat is a simple text file with each mirror listed in order it will be chosen by the installer.

3. Move https://[lettersandnumbers].cloudfront.net/ to the top of the mirror list
This will choose the Amazon mirror, basically guaranteed to be up and working, to the top.

4. Save the "mirrors.dat" file and run the installer from the Installer.exe file within the folder


Please do not do this unless you have issue with the installer. I am charged for bandwidth usage on Amazon.

6
Quote
Always thought myself a purist when it comes to FF music, but Roses and Wine mod for FF8 converted me. If the remaster/remix/cover or whatever is done at a similar tempo&style to the original, it's surprisingly refreshing to hear the old melodies brought to life with whole new vigor. Anyways that's why I'm here, and I was wondering if there's a comprehensive listing of included music and different versions anywhere? There's alot of faithful-to-the-original arrangements online that I would love to see whether any of them have found their way onto this mod.

Just saw this. Hi! A listing is available in the first post and on the GitHub page, but I can provide a quick but comprehensive summary here.

First off is the OST. This is taken from the official CDs, and sounds pretty much identical to what you would get without the mod. This is really only useful because it lets you avoid the sound effects turning off SPC channels.

Secondly, what's referred to as "FFT" is "FinalFanTim"'s remaster. You can find that on the forums here. It's actually what made me want to do this project in the first place.

Thirdly, what's referred to as "OCR" is the OCRemix Balance & Ruin album, available here.

Then, what's referred to as "SSC" is Sean Schafianksi's Final Fantasy 6 Remastered Discs One and Two. Disc One is available commercially on bandcamp here. Sean has graciously provided us permission to use his work as long as that link is readily available.

"FFAR" is Eiko Nichols' "Final Fantasy Acoustic Rendition", available commercially on bandcamp here

"CRC" is ChrystalChameleon's remasters, available on their YouTube channel here.

That's the major sources of audio, which leaves the "OTH" or "Other" options that have been edited and submitted mostly by fans of the project. These include the default Opera selection which is from Game Music Concert 4 by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the other opera selections by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra as well as The Black Mages,  and a couple of other songs from the Black Mages for iirc Dancing Mad and one other that escapes me atm.

7
Wemes:

Thanks for your report, I am aware that the transitions between parts of the final battle music are sudden and do not smoothly go from one part to another the way the original game does. Even with volume fading, this is not currently possible.

The problem is that there is no way for the code running on the SNES to tell when the song started actually playing and how far along it is. The MSU-1 just does not have that kind of status information exposed. Assuming based on framerate and e.g. the game time counter is flawed due to the fact not all platforms will be able to queue up and play the track as fast as the game requests it.

Without that status information, it is therefore impossible to tell the last time the song looped, and therefore when the next transition point should be.


tl;dr version: this is not a bug and will not, can not be fixed, not unless a new version of the MSU-1 add-on is made that has the ability to return the current sample position.

Never saying never, because I didn't expect resume support either, so.

8
Just released Hotfix Four here (Click here for a direct link to the Windows 64-bit installer).

Fixes issues with 1.1 and Japanese roms, notably that the installer was allowing people to choose optional patches that would not work on these ROMs. The reported bug on 1.1 (freeze during/after battle) not present in testing without a combination of 1.1 and TWUE.

tl;dr: US V1.1 and Japanese ROMs should now work, but will not let you apply incompatible patches.

If you are already using Dancing Mad on a US V1.0 ROM, there is no reason to update.

9
An update here: crashes reported on V1.1 ROMs, improper patching also reported in installer on V1.1 ROMs, further testing is needed

10
You can email me. .

11
If you'd like, I can send you my Chrono Trigger MSU-1 audio code, which fully supports smooth fading.  I'm pretty sure the CT and FFVI sound engines are largely identical.

I certainly wouldn't object to another example to look at! Madsiur actually already provided some working fading code for FF6 but I just have not gotten the time to sit down, translate the ASM between dialetcts (bass and wla-dx have very different syntax), or implement it. I had been holding off on that as Madsiur had stated his intent to fork the project and PR a copy himself, though like me he has gotten rather busy.

It's far easier for me at the moment to find time to work on/test/fix bugs in the installer, as not only is coding the ASM a greater cognitive load (I still don't consider myself very familiar or confident with this stuff), but at this point there's so many issues to check for regressions on every time I make a change, and I can't really unit test a ROM hack.

But yeah, I'll definitely give it a look.

12
I just discovered an amazing thing. The audio code we patch is identical between the Japanese, US, and US v1.1 versions of FF3. That is to say, it should be completely possible to *as is*, use Dancing Mad on both Japanese and V1.1 US copies of FF3, not just V1.0 US copies. I made an investigation of the files between the different versions and an entire 16kb segment of code starting at where I jump from is identical between different versions. Given said code is exactly what needs modified/replaced, unless any of our own RAM addresses conflict with the Japanese or patched US ROMs, this should mean that, and excuse my big bold words

Dancing Mad is, as far as I can tell, compatible with all known versions of FF6.
Please note that optional patches may or may not work.
I had never gotten around to testing for this compatibility before now, but I can say this with 90% certainty. Please report any bugs trying to run Dancing Mad on these versions!

The installer has now been updated to check for these additional versions.

13
So, I absolutely missed my original deadline of the end of june, by a few months. This is why I don't generally like making deadlines :P

*but*

I am happy to announce the release of
Dancing Mad Final Beta Hotfix Three

There's a *lot* of bug fixes and new stuff in this version, much of which I'm very excited to get into your hands. Here's a summary taken from the Readme for the installer itself:


Fixed Bugs

* A workaround for the issue where the wrong song plays during some of Shadow's cutscenes was implemented. The wrong song may still play for a split second.
* Installer is now usable without manually resizing the window on High DPI systems.
* Patch now uses a more recent version of wla-dx assembler.
* Phantom Train track now behaves correctly, playing train noises until the music is called for.
* Select-a-scenario menu is now properly silent, instead of playing the last song played.
* Patch is now compatible with ExHIROM patches.
* Installer no longer freezes while testing for the status of mirrors.
* Minor packaging fixes.
* Unused files removed from GitHub tree.

New Features

* Dancing Mad MSU-1 now works along with the Brave New World patch (apply after install). Technical details of this support are that state variables had to be moved to a different place in RAM so as not to conflict with BNW's state variables.
* Five different versions of the opera are now available! These include new versions The Black Mages, Distant Worlds concert and More Friends Concert, as well as the existing Game Music Concert 4 and OST versions. See section 2 for details.
* Installer is now capable of previewing songs! Currently support is only enabled for the Opera selections, but once previews are available for all tracks, a "preview" button will be available in the "custom track" selection table.
* Installer now checks for pre-existing PCM files in the install directory. If these are found, they are compared against the files on the server. Upon a match, the download is skipped. This enables updating your version of Dancing Mad or changing your selection of tracks without redownloading a large number of files.
* Sean Schafianski's "Disc 2" tracks now available to be downloaded/installed.
* Installer now outputs a log to dancing-mad-installer.log in your home directory (e.g., C:\Users\yourusername). Please attach this when reporting installer bugs!


And just to update people, here are the still existing known bugs/issues:

* NOT A BUG - On older versions of BSNES and older SD2SNES firmware, area music will restart after battles. Please see the thread on qhimm.com for discussion of this issue. Area music *will* resume on Higan v096 and later, bsnes-plus, snes9x-msu, and latest SD2SNES firmwares, due to updates to the MSU-1 code. I will not workaround nor fix resume support on earlier versions of Higan or BSNES.
* Tracks do not smoothly fade. Implementing this requires precise NMI timing and is a continuing project. Contributions welcome.
* Installer may look strange on High DPI systems (4K displays, 1080p laptops with small screens). It should at the very least be usable now, but for best effect please use the compatibility settings in Windows to set the DancingMadInstaller.exe to System instead of Application scaling.
* Music may revert to SPC after certain scenes. Known scenes mostly involve the Coin Song and the Figaro theme.

One thing I failed to note in the readme is that the latest versions of snes9x support the MSU-1 natively! No more need to download a specific MSU-1 version of Snes9x.

Downloads!

Windows AMD64 (64-bit) (if you're not sure, this is what you want)

Windows i386 (32-bit)

Linux/OSX/etc.

14
Just wanted to pop in and give an update. With two exceptions listed on GitHub (look at issues under the tag "patch"), all known issues have been fixed. The shadow scene fix is the above mentioned imperfect fix, and I'll have to do more investigation to try and figure out why it's bugging out like that in the first place, but yeah, we're as close to bug free as we've ever been at this point, knock on wood.

The only thing in the way of Hotfix Three is more work on the installer, specifically a new page to support the various available versions of the opera, and then a round of testing both of the installer and the patch. I would expect Hotfix Three by the end of this month, maybe early next, but I don't do definite release dates. :P

My apologies for the slow work and relative silence of late. I uhh... let's simplify it and say I basically fell out of a tree. I sustained a minor compression fracture to one of my vertebrae and have been out of commision for a while. I'm still not totally healed, but I'm healed enough to do some work at least.

New "features" in Hotfix Three will be proper compatibility with patches that use ExHiROM, full tested compatibility with Brave New World, and the new opera selections, as well as an updated version of TWUE available in the installer.

15
Unfortunately the zone doctor pokery ended up not very fruitful. Only one map is *specifically* used just for a Shadow scene, and I didn't want to mess up the music in other scenes. So until I can figure out the cause of the game asking track 2a to be played at ff volume, we're just going to have to deal with the imperfect fix we've got for now.

16
Alright so, I went with the above fix (adding a line to set the song to $00 in the event code for all the shadow scenes).

It works, for the most part. You get about a frame worth of the song playing after the scene starts but it's silent otherwise. Also, the inn is silent after the scene finishes, but the music starts backs up when you leave the inn. So not a perfect fix by any means, but it's serviceable and it does the job, and I learned a lot about event scripting in the process, so yay.

I'm also going to do a bit of poking around in zone doctor because the current behavior noted above combined with how the event scripts look implies to me that it's the actual loading of the new map causing the weird song behavior, so maybe there's something I can do there too, to at least stop the 'frame worth of wrong music' problem.

17
So this is strange. I'm watching the sequence of events as far as SPC commands when Shadow's dream sequence happens, and it's doing this:

The player walks to the center of the beds, then the screen fades to black:
Command $81 (Fade) volume $00 (silence, should be handled properly by my new code as a mute)

All good so far, but then...
command $10 (play track) track $2a (kids run through the city corner) volume $ff (full volume)

command $18 (play sfx) track $ad (presumably the "wheeoowheeoowheeoo" sound present in shadow's first dream cutscnee) volume $80



So the event is *specifically* asking to play Kids Runs Through The City Corner at *full volume* *after* stopping/muting it. Except there's nothing in the event code that should be causing it to do that! So I don't know why, but that's the source of the issue right there.
I can confirm my current fix re: muting when called with 1300:$81/1302:$00 *does* work for every shadow dream cutscene *after* the first. It's just the first that first mutes then immediately asks to play the music again.

This is with dancing mad applied. I'm going to have to run through the same sequence with a stock ROM to see if it's somehow my code causing it to glitch like that, and if so, how.

EDIT: Talked with madsiur. I've been avoiding doing any mucking about with event code because I want to avoid conflicts with other patches, but it may be worth sticking a call to play Track 00 (silence) in the shadow dream sequences just to make sure this doesn't happen. He gave me pointers on where to start.

18
Two major bugs have just been fixed and their fixes merged to the Master branch, the Phantom Train bug and the Select a Scenario scene bug, both involving music playing when it shouldn't.
Unfortunately the Shadow cutscene bug is still at large, I'll have to prod that scene thoroughly with bsnes-plus's debugger to figure out exactly what's causing the anomalous behavior. This may take a while.

19
:/ Unfortunately, what I hoped would be a fix for the Shadow cutscene bug has turned out not to be. Back to the drawing board, I'm going to have to break down what's happening in this scene as far as SPC commands and see if I'm missing something.

20
Okay so, I was doing testing on a laptop and had a bunch of issues staying connected during the install. Because of this, I've decided I'm going to implement a system where each change to the song list is a new set of md5sums, which the installer checks the install directory against before downloading, so if the installer is interrupted or you're installing on top of a directory that already has all the songs you need in it, it can skip the ones it finds that match. It might make the initial loading time for the installer a little slower though.

21
I need a little bit of help with debugging the Shadow scene bug. Specifically, I need a save (srm format) right before this happens and directions to reproduce, as I don't really have the time atm to organically reach this point in the game to test my fix. Feel free to use one of the action replay "save anywhere" codes to achieve this (do note however that use of these codes in general can sometimes produce... weird situations.)

EDIT: Also, bit of an update regarding that fix. Essentially what I'm doing is muting the volume whenever something calls for a fadeout, as a temporary workaround for when the game should be playing silence and isn't. However, this causes some pretty abrupt musical cuts, noticably (so far in testing) at the end of Dancing Mad Part 3 before Part 4 starts. This is very much a temporary, somewhat heavy handed solution and I'm even considering offering two patches in the installer because I could understand somebody considering this a regression.

22
Okay so, I did an unorthodox thing that seems to have worked. Read the issue for details, https://github.com/Insidious611/DancingMadFF6/issues/74, but basically I'm using a flag setting and checking/clearing routine to make it use the SPC for the train noises where appropriate and then switch to the MSU Phantom Train music when called for. It seems to work perfectly so far, but the amount of changes I needed to make to the "PlayCommand" label in the ASM means I also need to check Dancing Mad for regressions before I can 100% call this a fixed bug.

I can confirm, however, that the situation described in the original bug report (that of the ending to the Phantom Train sequence, where it should be playing train noises followed by silence as Cyan mourns) is in my branch now performing 100% the same as an unmodified ROM.

If anyone else wants to help me test both this and the fade-out workaround (which just sets volume immediately to 0 when a fade-to-zero is called for), apply this IPS from the train-and-fadeout-fixes branch to a clean ROM and replace your Dancing Mad ROM with it.

23
So this is interesting. Madsiur, remember how you said you didn't know what SPC command $89 does? Well, I still don't know for sure, but I do know where it's used! >.<

The phantom train does *not* use $82 for its subsong switching. When it calls for track $20 (decimal 32, phantom train), the bit with the train noise plays by default, and then it calls $89 when it's time to switch to the actual song (still with $20 and $ff in $1301 and $1302).

This is going to need a lot more investigation than I thought, and it means the fix I tried to make for it is pointless :P

An interesting side effect of this in a vanilla ROM that I never realized before: All of the save rooms in the phantom train segment are specially coded to trigger SPC Command $89 when you leave them. So, when you save and reload your game, it plays the train sound effect, but the minute you go to leave it segues into the music.

24
I admittedly wasn't even aware he'd done any disc two work. Yeah, I'd be happy to include it, provided I can find a download. I purchased a copy of the Disc One album in FLAC form to make the original MSU-1 PCMs, and I'm only finding the Disc Two work in non-downloadable form on SoundCloud atm.

---

Progress report on the hack: At the moment I'm mostly trying to consider how to tackle the current bugs. A lot of them are due to the way I'm handling (or, to be more accurate,  currently *not* handling) the fading commands. Madsiur's list of SPC commands from his patch is really helpful for me as far as trying to fix that issue, but I'm mulling over whether I really want to put in workarounds I'll have to take out later once the actual fade code is in.

To be specific, while I haven't had time to test this theory re issue #73, it and issues #38, and #32 stem primarily from the fact FF6 sometimes relies on a song having faded to 0 in order to have silence in a scene, and as I don't directly handle SPC command $81 at all, the songs continue playing at whatever volume they were last set to instead of fading to 0.

The workaround in this case, at least, the easiest one I can think of atm, would be to hook SPC command $81 with a simple routine that checks the requested volume, and, if it's 0, mute the MSU-1. This would turn all fade outs into sudden silences, *hopefully* not breaking anything in the process but probably fixing these bugs for the moment.

However, this entire routine (aside the actual hooking of SPC command $81 which will likely be vital to the fading code) would need to be cut out whenever actual fading is implemented.

Issue #74, the phantom train issue, is likely a combination of not handling $81 (fading) and not correctly handling $82 (subsong switching). Right now, I only handle $82 for Dancing Mad, because it's the only song (set of songs really) in the game that absolutely *needs* subsong switching to work at all. However, Phantom Train uses subsong switching to switch between the actual song and the train sounds, and my current $82 code ignores any calls that aren't during Dancing Mad.

The subsong part of #74 may be an easy fix, but it may just expose a lingering fading-based issue as I bet the train sound will continue looping at full volume.

25
Sounds like a good plan, fork away! And no rush, as I said I'm pretty busy myself at the moment.

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