DrO's Game Audio Bits n Bobs

This page is a holding area for a few bit's of work that i've done for game audio plug-ins (you know the ones that allow you to play the music from your favourite Playstation, N64 and anything else that's been done and had the music ripped).

My main area of work in this area of plug-in development has been on the in_zip plug-in which makes it easier to play back the music since it's usually distributed in archives (zip and rar mainly though also supports ace and 7z). There has been additional work on wrapper plug-ins and fixing plug-ins natively including some patches to fix issues with the 64th Note plug-in (still needs some more work done it but i've not had the time to sort out further patches for it as of August 2010).

As an additional area of work i've done some work on fixing YMAMP (in_ym) to work with Winamp 5.x's media library, advanced text formatting and multi-user config support along with fixing a number of bugs in the plug-in which could cause corruption of gym files.

The second additional area of work has been in the creation of a wrapper plug-in for SNESAmp which has the same goal as the changes natively made to YMAMP.

YMAMP v2.5

YMAMP is a plug-in which allows you to play GYM and CYM files in Winamp. Taken from zophar.net this is what YMAMP is about...

YMAMP is without a doubt the best and most complete GYM & CYM plug-in for Winamp that exists today. It allows Winamp to play Genesis (GYM) and Callus (CYM) music files. The GYM part of YMAMP has full support for PCM sound, which most other GYM players are not capable of playing.

Due to the age of the 2.0 and the unofficial 2.0b builds of YMAMP not working with newer updates of Winamp (mainly with regards to media library and ATF integration into the player) i decided to try and update the plug-in to bring it into line with the newer Winamp features. Here you can find the build i've made of the plug-in so if things aren't working when they did in 2.0/2.0b then it's my fault for a change :o)

The features that the newer YMAMP builds implement are...

Support for reading/saving of the plug-in settings based on Winamp's multi-user settings
Support for the Winamp Media Library tag reading and writing (which is also the basis for the Advanced Title Formatting support)
Numerous bug fixes with the 2.0/2.0b code (improves reliability of the compression/decompression modes and even the random lockups the older versions exhibit)
Use of Winamp 5.5+ unified file info editor (on supporting client installs)
Use of Winamp 5.5+ localisation support (on supporting client installs with a translated lng file)

With the introduction of the media library/atf support, the following tags are available for query from the plug-in...

%artist% (Game Title)
%title% (Song Title)
%publisher% (Game Publisher)
%length% (Length of the track in ms)
%comment%
%dumper% (Dumped by)
%dumpemu% (Dumped with)
%compressed% (Is the GYM file compressed or not)

SNESAmp Wrapper

SNESAmp is a plug-in which allows you to play music from the old SNES games (done by dumping parts of the cartridges into the SPC file format).

SNESAmp is one of the best SPC input plug-ins for Winamp, however development of the plug-in has become sparodic (like mine as well at times). As well only the older source code for v3.1 available (v3.3.4 is the current version of the plug-in as of August 2010 and v3.2 was the version when the wrapper was started) and due to not having the tools to build the SNESAmp source files natively with the development tools i have, i decided to make a wrapper plug-in to fix some issues with SNESAmp's integration with Winamp's media library and advanced text formatting features.

The wrapper works with a few quirks of the Winamp input plug-in api to allow it to load the original SNESAmp plug-in (renamed to a different name so as to not conflict with the overrides) and by doing this it is able to act as a transparent layer between Winamp and the original plug-in to allow the features the wrapper adds. As such it is recommended that you use the wrapper's installer to install this in all situations to ensure all files are renamed / installed correctly. The features that the SNESAmp wrapper provides are...

Support for reading / saving of the plug-in settings based on Winamp's multi-user settings
Support for the Winamp Media Library tag reading and writing (which is also the basis for the Advanced Title Formatting support)
Not RSN files currently (and this will never be able save back into the RSN files due to RAR write support licensing)

With the introduction of the media library / atf support, the following tags are available for query from the plug-in (with SNESAmp atf mappings noted)...

%artist% (%4)
%title% (Song Title %2)
%album% (Game %3)
%publisher% (%5)
%year% (Copyright %6)
%disc% (OST Disc %8)
%track% (OST Track %9)
%comment% (%D)

%artist% (%4)
%title% (Song Title %2)
%album% (Game %3)
%publisher% (%5)
%year% (Copyright %6)
%disc% (OST Disc %8)
%track% (OST Track %9)
%comment% (%D)

Note: There is a new update to this wrapper which provides a unified file info editor and also allows displaying of album art from inside rsn archives so should be released soon (when written in August 2010)

in_zip - Archive Support

Then we come to in_zip which has the aim of allowing Winamp to playback media stored in archives (zip, 7z, rar, ace) without you (the user) having to extract it manually. The goal is to make the extraction process as transparent as possible from usability of archive formats to you and also to Winamp.

There's more to come about this plug-in (which has been under development for a few years now) but until then, here's some screenshots of what the plug-in currently offers as it's options.

Note: It may seem like this is a dead project, it is not and there have been a number of private test builds for people since the last release which has improved things but isn't really stable enough for general usage. The main issue is that trying to do a complete re-write of a plug-in (as needed to make it work as a playlist loader service which Winamp 5.2 and higher supports) along with everything else i do means this has been left as a lower priority though hopefully this will change soon (when written in August 2010).