The Return of Sega Rally 2 MRM

[TheRealDise]

Hello everyone, I'm back after not having been actively checking this forum since 2018.

I'm here to announce that I will be resuming work on the Sega Rally 2 Music Replacement Mod, which makes use of the MP2 custom soundtracks feature in the SVN builds of the emulator. The mod was never very good, as I just used stolen music in it. Now, I will be starting work on a fully original soundtrack for the mod.

I realise the new SVN builds don't have custom MP2 features, but I will use an older build as they work fine with Sega Rally 2.

The soundtrack will be available (for free) sometime at https://brysonrecords.bandcamp.com and my SoundCloud if I have space.

Thanks for reading, and I'm happy to be here again,
-Sabian

[Bart]

We should probably find a way to integrate this into Supermodel permanently. I wonder if the new MPEG decoder could handle MP3 as well? If so, it would be a little bit of work to support decoding of arbitrary sampling rate music but should be doable if anyone is up for it.

[Ian]

It does support mp3

[Jiterdomer]

Only .mp2 file, you can convert your songs in Audacity. While I started looking at the modified .dsb code on Discord, tried to import the code on the new DSB.cpp, it doesn't work.

[Bart]

It will require some careful work but it should absolutely be possible to support both .mp3 and .mp2. If DSB.cpp needs to be overhauled so be it. One really stupid thing I did due to my lack of experience with audio code at the time was to write my own re-sampling+mixing code to convert the 16KHz DSB audio to 44.1KHz rather than simply letting SDL do the work. I think DSB.cpp (and possibly the relevant interface points in SoundBoard.cpp and even Audio.cpp) should be reworked to decode to its own buffer and then use SDL to mix with the main buffer. The next step would be to then intercept the MIDI commands that are forwarded to DSB and, if music replacement is activated, enable a state where data is sourced from an external music file.