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PsfPlayer Information
Posted on 2010-08-09 18:17:04 |
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As I've said previously, I've released my PSF music player for everyone to see. I've been working on it for about 2 years, at the same time I was working on Play!. My idea was to use the opportunity of creating a PSF music player to have a good IOP emulation and integrate it in the PS2 emulator when it'll going good enough. Right now, I've integrated most parts of PsfPlayer's IOP emulation core in the emulator and that's what is running the IO drivers coming from the games.
The player in itself isn't that great... Highly Experimental performs better and gives better results, while PsfPlayer still have its quirks when it comes to playing some specific games music (the music coming from the Final Fantasy series for example). But it's been a great sandbox for testing various things, in particular, my new JIT compilation engine. But also, during the past 6 months, I also took the opportunity to test another idea of mine. We all know there's PSF soundtracks for the PSX and PS2 games... While playing Phantasy Star Portable on my PSP, I noticed that most songs sounded like they were synthesized. So, I decided to check if this game was using a synthesized music format and if it was the case, write something that could play them in the same way PSF's and PSF2's are played. Well, it was a success. I found out that the game was using MIDI files along with instrument banks to play its music. I wrote a mini PSP emulator, disassembled and patched the game executable so that it only tries to play music and wrapped all of that in PsfPlayer. The PSFP (PlayStation Sound Format Portable) support is available in the version I've posted last week. I'll try to make a new page that explains what are PSFP's and explain which of the PSP's system features are needed to play these files. I'll also post the Phantasy Star Portable pack, (which can be downloaded here for now) but I'd like to have more than one pack of music in there, so, I'm looking for other potential games that could have its music ripped in the same manner. Trying the PSPF player with different games will be a good test for the file format and will allow me to fix some problems that are currently present in the player (screwed up reverb emulation for example). Hopefully, I'll be able to post that info sometime this week. I'd also like to write about my new big JIT compiler project I've been working on, which is almost ready to be used in Play! and PsfPlayer. |