Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Music Hacking?

Hello, SSRG. I am new here, and recently begun a hack of Sonic 2. It is coming along great! I have most of EHZ act one completely customized, new pallet, level layout, everything is looking nice. But once things begin to look nice, they need to sound nice too right? My EHZ is now "Ice Paradise Zone", and I have the music to fit. But, it is a midi. and since I am new to the hacking community, I was hoping I could get some help on putting said midi in place of EHZ's music. I can make it a mp3 or wav if necessary. I am using the 2007 Disassembly. I am hoping there is some sort of easy to use tool, I tried Sonic QX and was lost, even with a tutorial. I turned the midi into an XM with Midi2XM, and attempted to use XM4SMPS. It is very confusing.


EDIT:So, I also was using Sonik Sprite to change sprites, like giving Sonic and Tails modifications like mouths and such. But I wasn't aware that after modifying the level layout with SonLVL (ASM editing) Sonik Sprite would stop working. Is there any way I can finish modifying my sprites without completely reworking my new level layouts?


EDIT 2: Figured out how to do the sprites without redoing my level layout. It was simple once I thought about it a little bit.


Thank you all.


-Bluesfire

 

Sonic 2's sound driver is unique and is rather perplex and tedious to work with. The sound driver is running on the Mega Drive's sub-processor known as the Z80, and the software for that is compressed in an LZ varient compression method named Saxman, the individual music tracks are also compressed in this way. To work with this, you will need to understand the SMPS format, ensure all the pointers are correct, ensure it is compressed to Saxman format correctly, and ugh... It is a right royal pain!!


I can assume that you are making you hack on the ROM itself rather than a disassembly, this makes it even more harder to edit music, programming and even certain art data. I strongly recommend checking out a "disassembly":


Download


This is the Sonic 2 ROM that has been split up into sections, the instructions to the game code (a.k.a. software) have been reverse engineered back into their mnemonic state (i.e. words instead of numbers), this will allow you to make a whole load of different changes to the game that would be very difficult to do with the ROM itself.


Having the ability to change the instructions themselves is a bonus, as it'll allow you to change the sound driver to something a lot more easier to work with, that may come later in time though, you'll need to learn how to program before stepping into those territories.


It's a major learning curve, but one recommended following.

 

It's a funny thing Sonic 2 music hacking has been brought up since that's with I'm trying to do as well. Right now I just want to replace the music in Sky Chase Zone with the music from Azure Lake in Sonic 3. Sonic Pocket Adventure inspired me to do it, obviously. I tried to take the BIN file for Azure Lake's music, rename it to "SCZ.bin" and replace the original SCZ.bin with it in Sonic 2's music folder. Of course, I got a build error that says this:

I don't exactly know what it means, but I assume it's saying Azure Lake's music file is too big. I honestly don't know where to go from here, so I'm reading Retro's music hacking guide instead.

 

I read that guide too, Just confused me more. I wish someone who knows what they are doing could dumb it down for a noobie like me.

 

MarkeyJester, It is an honor to have you try to help me, your hacks are amazing! And no, I am using a disassembly. It is very confusing stuff for me, as I am still a noob to this thing.

 

No need to double post. You could have had that in one post.

 

I know, I didn't realize that Markey had also replied. My bad.


So can anyone help me out here? I am really stumped.