FE7 music patch (not in progress)

[Alusq]

edit: I happened to see this thread come up on a search for something unrelated, so/and/but/etc if you are interested in some kind of music patch here is the FE8 sample patch. It doesn’t add songs to the game, but it gives you a bunch of new instruments that the vanilla FE8 noticeably lacked.

original post:

The next project I’ve had in mind is something a bit more useful: a patch for FE7 that does nothing but add different music from other games. Even after music insertion has been relatively easy with Sappy for a while, I find that there just isn’t a whole lot of music in FE mods flying about nowadays, save the odd track here or there. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places? Dunno.

The first phase of this will see me adding several songs from each era of FE, each song being remixed with the FE7 native instrument map in mind. They will very likely be written to the end of the d00000~e00000 range (since I’m assuming that someone would start at d00000 for free space in their mod), although I do want to squeeze a few into the space where some less-used FE7 music is to replace them. Patch release #1.

Second phase: adding music for more in-system things: battle themes, healing, title screen, death, game over, etc. I am wary of including these in the most basic release because the choices for these songs in particular can sometimes make or break the atmosphere of a mod (the player will be hearing them all the time, after all), and if multiple people use the patch then their mods will sound the same. For this reason, I might skip this phase and make it last. Patch release #2.

Third phase: adding just a few more pieces of music from non-Fire Emblem games. This is mainly for the sake of variety and so modders can have music that’s less likely to have been heard by their players before. Release #3, the final release, which would ideally have about 20 new tracks not including in-system ones.

All music would be included in .mid and .s form in their own folders with the releases, as well as a guide to write the music to a different place (using hex editing, so those who can’t get Sappy to work would not be left out) if that end part of the d00000~e00000 block is already occupied.

All this being said, does anyone have any music (FE or no) they’d like to see possibly start popping up in mods? Or is this a trashy idea and I should just release the music on its own with a tutorial instead?

[dancer_A]

@Alusq

I should just release the music on its own with a tutorial instead?

I think this would make more sense to do, yes.

[Agro]

[FE7] Getting the full 8 instruments in songs

EDIT: A fix has been found! Abstract Current resources indicate that FE7 is capable of playing 8 instruments simultaneously, but actually in most cases the limit is 7, even though the game will read up to 8 tracks. This tutorial will explain how to get the 8th instrument playing all the time, rather than just in the title screen. Presumably the same principles applies to FE6 and FE8; however, as of writing I have not looked into these and thus cannot confirm. Explanation of terminology MIDI:…

Any patch that helps out with music should adhere to this, no question about it. I’d say you’ll get much better mileage out of a tutorial (teach a man to fish, and all that) and I’ve been trying to write one for months. I’m happy to serve as a consultant while you do all the hard work, though!

[Alusq]

[quote=Agro]Oddly enough, this is easily remedied by writing the song to an entry in
the song table in any value past 0x007F, and making sure that no song
before 0x80 besides the title screen music and the opening theme ever
plays.[/quote]
The only problem is that if I implemented that in the patch, I would either have to re-point each song in FE7 or tell people that they can’t use anything before 0x80 (which is at least the majority of songs used in scenes and such). This is kind of problematic when I intend to add on to the game’s music selection with this patch, not replace all the vanilla options.
I actually tried to do the 8-track method on my main project once, but I couldn’t get it to work for the life of me. Even after I made sure only stuff after 0x7f plays and re-pointed the in-system music, the music would still stop after a battle (maybe some sound effects were before 0x80?), so I gave up and decided to deal with just having seven tracks.

That being said, I’ll just concentrate on getting the music into an easily insertable format rather than worrying about patches for now, although I still would like to make a patch for the sake of people who don’t have the first clue about how to go about inserting music. Maybe we can get a Music Repository set up here in the future?

[Agro]

@Alusq

the music would still stop after a battle

That’s because you forgot to change the song priority, silly

[Alusq]

I tried it again on a fresh rom, preparing for a major facepalm moment, but nothing doing. I changed the pointers in the music array editor (and the numbers in HxD) and the priorities for both of the tracks that I inserted were already set to Highest. The music still stops after battles.

It’s probably good practice that I keep my music to seven tracks anyway— playing them with the full eight tracks enabled will still make them sound better because there will be fewer notes cutting each other off in places where there’s a lot of stuff at the same time playing.

[Agro]

@Alusq

Highest.

You need to change battle music to Highest (BGM) and map music to High (Map Music). “Priority” is a misnomer, it’d be better known as “slot in the RAM to use”. If you put both battle music and map music in the same place in the RAM, the game loses track of where it was in the BGM because the battle music has completely taken over.

By the way, map music is very conducive to 8 tracks - you will rarely have any other sound effects playing (menu beeps and boops don’t count). Tracks will only cut off if there are footsteps, tile change sound effects, or the player phase/enemy phase sound. Battle music should be kept to 7 tracks at all times.

[Alusq]

oOOOoh, that makes sense. It would be nice to have that information in the thread as well if it isn’t already there. I assumed for all this time that it was only for whether music or sound effects were prioritised over one another.

Now then, brb having a dilemma of whether or not to re-insert all of the music in my main project.

[Agro]

It… kind of seemed self explanatory. The editor very clearly says that one is for map music and the other for BGM…

[Alusq]

The Nightmare editor? There’s no indication that any of the music will screw up if you just decided to put it all on Highest thinking that it would make sound effects mute fewer parts of the music, unless there’s some doc explaining it that I didn’t read.