DKC Atlas Forum

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat has fully sequenced, dynamic Music tracks. Did anyone ever actually notice this?

I've been attempting to rip the Turret Tusk theme but it's blasted DIFFICULT. The music instruments dynamically change throughout each battle, depending on how many times you've hit the Tusk. But there's a problem: NOWHERE does DKJB provide a sound test, or any kind of option to turn the sound effects off.

It looks like the only way to rip this game is to hack the game to either (1) nuke all sound effects (which is probably the better choice but is more difficult) or (2) find music modifier and swap with the title screen music or select music (this would be easier but not as elegant).

EDIT: Yes, there is an OST for this game, but it's missing a LOT of really good tracks from the game!

I never really thought about how hard it would be to rip Dynamic music, but it does sound difficult. I hope you can get it done, it would be nice to have a complete soundtrack.

Yeah....

The problem with hacking this game is that it's a Gamecube game - that's a 32bit processor with who knows what kind of capabilities. It's nowhere near as understandable as the SNES is.

Here's what I've managed to rip in {48KHz, Stereo, 16bit} so far, due mostly to luck:
[!] = Perfect Rip (with Perfect Looping if applicable) in Verbatim Quality (VQ) and no SFX.
[#] = Rip with 2 or more loops (but not re-loopable yet), in VQ and no SFX.
[%] = Rip with 2 or more loops and stops directly on loop boundary, in VQ and no SFX.
— Jungle Beat Theme [!]
— Kingdom Select Theme [!]
— Ice Warren [#]
— Tusk Boss Introduction [%]
— Accept Selection [SFX]
— Nintendo Logo SFX [SFX]
— Select Kingdom [SFX]

This isn't going to be easy...

Here's something to note: when playing the level Dawn Savanna, if you stand near a sleeping pig, the music changes to a lullaby arrangement.

After this, how about investigation on the Wii version?

I have not looked into Wii because that's a little too far out of my reach (homebrew, Wii emulation).

By disabling lots of graphics options and rendering at 0.375x size, I can get ~55 frames a second to play the GCN game at almost full speed. I don't want to bother somehow obtaining a Wii ISO because I'm targeting the GCN version for the rip I want to do, not the Wii one (GCN version has some things the Wii version had removed, Kingdoms/worlds were re-ordered, etc).

Some interesting news: as of a few hours before this post, I did some research on Super Mario Galaxy (the same people did DKJB) over at hcs and I found a way to rip the nearly 2000 audio samples from the game,

...but the actual music and sound bank data is still buried somewhere else in DKJB's music files.

It's virtually impossible to decipher this crap, as it's all proprietary binary data that Nintendo came up with.

I do know for certain that the music is sequenced like MIDI, and that there's probably a way to get BMS files converted into MIDIs, but it doesn't automatically play back the 100% correct music (as it's just a MIDI file). You have to screw around for months in FL Studio or something to get all the tracks, and there's no guarantee that we'd have a Platinum OST because of the which-sample-goes-to-which-track uncertainty.
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On the other side of things, I've been searching for a music modifier code during my spare time (using Dolphin emulator), with only limited success. I do have something that changes the level start music (when DK is sitting and waiting for the first clap) to a booing crowd or random BG-SFX like winds or etc, but I suspect that a nearby value in memory might hold a key to getting the real music modifier code.

I don't have any memory debuggers or any memory viewers, only a very simple cheat search tool (that only works the first time you open the dialog - doing more than one search corrupts the program memory!).

Sorry to bump a 4 year old thread but has anyone managed to convert the samples or sequences for DKJB to the proper formats, wav, midi? Anyone working on this?