legend of zelda link to the past GBA sound restoration hack

[grittykitty]

i originally asked in this thread if any sound hack to this game had been made, mainly to get rid of link's constant "yelping" that was absent from the original SNES game.

fellow forum member Anapan made such a patch and posted a link to it. i got excited and asked if he could make a patch to restore some of link's other sounds to resemble the original SNES game, as the GBA version has link voiced much like the n64 game, ocarina of time. i find this very annoying, as i'm sure others do.

as of this posting, he's made two additional drafts which have had varying results on the two emulators i tested on my mac (boycott advance, and visualboy advance). the results of the 2nd draft on my elink flash card played on a ds lite unfortunately left much to be desired, though i appreciate the hard work Anapan's put into this! also, my rom version may have just been the wrong one, which is why i'd like other people to test this out.

i encourage other people to test these drafts out on your emulators and actual hardware. in my opinion, emphasis should be placed on flash cart compatibility, since the original SNES version is much easier to emulate considering the generally lower specs required of computers to run SNES emulation as opposed to GBA.

download the IPS patch, most current versions is:
http://www3.telus.net/anapan8/LTTP_GBA_ ... draft2.zip

or get the older versions from the original thread and apply it to an unpatched version of the north american rom. then, please post your results - which patch you tried, whether you tested it on an emulator or hardware, and which flash cart or emulator (as well as operating system) you tested it on.

[Anapan]

Zelda LTTP GBA restoration draft 2.

Are you sure you're patching the correct version of the rom? I tried the latest patch in both my Supercard in a GBM and my M3 DS Real in a DS and couldn't recreate the effect you talked about. Try running the rom through Cowering's GoodGBA. The correct file is Legend of Zelda, The - A Link To The Past Four Swords (U) [!].GBA with an MD5 checksum of 3287ca66e5cc285a9fe3a922051e84c6

Any feedback is appreciated.
One that I can't correct much is the jump-off-a-ledge sound because there wasn't space to fit the full length sound. I may be able to make it sound a bit better by recreating the sine-wave ADSR from scratch.
Another thing that would be helpful is sound volume. Right now everything I replaced has been normalized to -10 DB.

[grittykitty]

i'm not sure about the checksum of the rom, but the file name i applied the patch to was the same as the one you mentioned. also, i used IPS patcher for mac os. not sure if that has any effect. but as i mentioned, the sounds worked fine through my emulator, so it could just be a problem with my specific flash cart. i'll send you a PM in moment.

[Pullmyfinger]

This is a very good patch, the annoying Link voices always kept me from getting far in the game. I have an M3 perfect and could test for you guys, just send me a link to the rom and patch via PM and I'll post my results.

....now if someone made a patch to get the right button mapping in Kirby Superstar for the DS

Also, you are alive grittykitty!

[grittykitty]

damn, i've been meaning to bring my ds and flash cart to work, but i've been so busy that i forgot. thusly, haven't had time to further test this

pullmyfinger, i just sent you a pm. if you can do some testing too, that would be great!

and yes, i'm very much alive! between work and going back to school, i just don't have enough free time to get on messenger anymore. at least using these forums at work looks like i'm doing something related to my job

[Anapan]

My friend gave the patch a good amount of testing and told me the sword sound is a bit too low-pitched. He also suggested BSNES for recording the samples since it's the most accurate SNES emulator (it's programmer follows the MAME philosophy - min system requirements are 2600+ Mhz!). I'm about to install it so hopefully it will result in some better quality samples. Finally, I'll leave a bit more blank space around the samples when I'm replacing them. Hopefully that will result in something I'd consider releasable.

[grittykitty]

thanks for the update, sounds good! i guess i'll wait for that before testing on real hardware since it's a lot of trouble for me to get games on the flash cart. elink is not known for its simplicity, and owning a mac only makes it harder

bsnes has a mac port as well, and if my computer wasn't 5 years old i would try to get those samples for you myself. i'll just stick with my status as a nerdy fanboy tester for the time being

[Anapan]

Heh, well I'm not having a great time with BSNES atm. There's no sound recording in the emulator. I'll probably use my brother's computer for that part and just use the Audigy KX mixer's soundboard to patch the output into an ASIO program rather that trying to find a program that hooks into Win32's mess of a sound mixer. BSNES also doesn't allow sound channel disabling. I'm trying to remember if there's a point in the game where there is actually no music playing. Does anyone know if that's even possible, like after a boss is killed, or after a cutscene or minigame type thing?

[grittykitty]

i tried looking for a sound test code, to no avail. there's apparently one in the gba version, but i doubt those original sounds are somehow hidden in the rom. i don't know if this would be helpful, but i found this site:
http://noproblo.dayjo.org/ZeldaSounds/

[Anapan]

I got everything set up to redo everything on this patch, but was recently called to a big job out of town. I will definitely not have time to do any sort of work on it for at least a month probably 2. I'd still like to hear any comments on the last draft version.