FF6, How to play it using custom mp3 replacements for each zone.

Hello

This is my first post. I love the design of this website! Good job guys!

I have a question (I wasnot sure where to put it, so I placed it here)

Q: How do you play Final Fantasy 3,6 and have the back ground music replaced by a custom sound track?

The reason I am asking is because, these folks just released a music album of FF6 (which is free, and amazing) and I want to play the game using these tracks.
http://ff6.ocremix.org

Any ideas on how to do this?

Hello, and welcome to the site!
I suggest looking at the thread that Lord Nattak, Master of FF6 music, has done.
Thread1
Thread 2

Short answer:
Turn down the sound on your TV/in your emulator, and play the new tracks in iTunes (or your audio file player of choice).

Long answer:
Unless I'm drastically wrong about the limitations of the SNES hardware (real and in emulation), those threads are going to be useless for what you're looking for. It is possible to inject custom music into a ROM, but because of the nature of the SNES/FF6 sound engine, I don't believe there's any way to use MP3s. Keep in mind that the SNES rather predates MP3s -- the MP3 format wasn't even properly released until 1995! (At least, so says the Almighty Wiki.)


You might -- might -- have some success looking at the GBA release; there's a music patch for that version (I think exclusively for the EU release, due to ROM sizes) that I believe includes an imported MP3 for the opera sequence. That said, you again run into the issue of ROM size; ROMs can only be expanded so far before they start crashing. You might have room for one, MAYBE two of the Balance and Ruin tracks, but definitely not the whole package.

The only other alternative I can think of is the under-development FF6 SDK. You can find it here: http://www.hbgames.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10208 It's not, to my knowledge, anywhere near finished yet, but it's the only thing I can think of that would allow custom MP3s for FF6. Of course, you'd have to wait until it's finished...

All that aside, I also question if the tracks (while incredibly awesome) are appropriate for in-game use, in terms of how easily/effectively they'll loop smoothly.

ETA: I take it back. If someone were to take the source of this and adapt it for FF6, that could work (although then you still have to deal with the aforementioned looping issues). I'm not a C++ coder or I'd take a look at it myself.

Thanks for your comments guys. Wow there are quite a few options. Ok I will start studying my C++. This might be a good chance to teach myself as well, so I will try out things and post again if I can figure something out! Thanks!

Chrono Trigger Flames of Eternity uses some sort of ROM hacking to play MP3's using an emulator (ZSNES?) and separate MP3 files. You might want to check on that to see if it can be done with FF6.

Hope that helps.

More about that, I asked Zerra Deth, the creater of CTM before about a possible FF6 version of his program since they use such similar music cores, and this is what he responded with:

Zerra Deth: Okay, after some quick investigation, while the music formats for the game are the same, the engine itself is different. I'm not sure how different, but it at least uses different command numbers and obviously different offsets for sending information to the SPC. I assumed it would be the same since CT, the CT-Pre and RD all share the same exact engine. I'm not sure how easy it would be to port CTM to work with FFIV, it would require a good chunk of rewriting and the behaviors that CTM mimics to "emulate" CT's audio engine might not be the same as those in FFVI.

If you have experience with hex editing and whatnot to make your own code in the ROM, you may be able to do it itself. You could probably strip out the Epoch and Credits fix (though you might need something similar for other songs in FF6), you would have to change the offsets for patching the song pointer to silence, you would have to change the 4 bytes for checking if the ROM is FF6, you will probably need to change the silence song, since after getting to know the SPC engine in CT more extensively, the way they use pointers is janky so the silence track is probably the "same" in FF6, but the pointers/bytes themselves are different so the memcompares would fail between the two. Then you would have to find where the game sends commands to the SPC (hardware registers 2410 - 2413) (only supported ones, such as Song Changes, and Volume Changes (and also hope that the song interruptions work the same way, or that they don't exist at all, those are a f**k**g mess) and then do custom code for them, which basically consists of patching the place that command is used to use a jump, store the command and params to the end of ram where CTM can see them, run the code that you patched over for the jump, and return.