KSS Extraction

Hi niek,
I'm sorry I cannot help because You far above me in this topic. I'm stuck trying to make a kss player on linux/Ubuntu.

I guess everything to be learnt about KSS should be in msx_plug for WinAmp Kobaryn player, since I think kss is common format, and MGS BGM OPX MPK MBM formats are transcoded to KSS and then re-played.

Anyways Naruto has built a ROM with its songs and gave instruction to build a kss compilation with it.

Link to Naruto page, click on MSX - FAN special disc to get files.

In the same page there are other examples or pure music ROM (Yoshida and FM-BIOS TEST) and also a converter from MPK MGS to KSS format.

Hi niek,
in facts I did just used that libkss implementation that compiles natively on my GNU/Linux/Ubuntu machine.

You can look at up-today porting of samples_win32.c module, which is a command line KSS player on Windows by Brezza himself, if You download here a beta version with sources and all files modified by me (I know it is not cleaned but it works)
Here samples_win32.c had become samples_linux.c.
It can play KSS MGS OPX BGM MPK and MBM, like a plain in_msx/msx_plug plug-in for WinAmp/Kobarin.

I'm making a little progress here.

- The offset thing was my bad; z80dasm has an automatic offset of 0x100h and I forgot to substract the first 0x10h bytes from the KSS header
- I created a little script that disassembles the kss file with auto labeling, the correct offsets and it adds a remark at the addresses where the init and the player are pointed at in the KSS header.
- Many KSS files from the early Konami roms use a similar technique; in the KSS file add 0x10h bytes after the KSS header and before the entire ROM file. In this part a call is made to the PSG initialisation stuff in the rom with a push af before and pop af after an then a jp.
- However, I tried what happened without the jp, because I figured that the KSS player will ignore everything non-music related, so the whole game initialisation stuff does nothing, that worked with at least at two games.
- The PSG initialisation stuff usually uses a jp or call to 0x93, sometimes a out (0x0ah).
- So that's kinda doable.
- The player is a different story however to me at least. They don't look similar at all, it's possible the player address used in the KSS files is not perfect, maybe it's pointing just somewhere in the game routine and eventually it'll reach the audio stuff?
- I tried changing the address the player routine should be at, based on (very) basic analysis of the code, and that worked sometimes.

To be continued... FMPAC stuff for example. Should be something like out 7C and 7D I guess, or are there more options?

I wonder if it's possible to make for example a memory dump of the active ANMA Relax demo, and then find the player and music in it. Might be possible that some of the code required initialising everything has been overwritten during the process? Don't know if this happens often in code?

converting .kss to .vgm would be really great, if possible

@nitrofurano: conversion is hard, considering the complete different approach of storing and playing the audio files. But, there's a way already I guess, at least for PSG/FMPAC. Since there's a KSS player for MSX, this can run in OpenMSX as well. Then you could use the script from Grauw giangiacomo.zaffini is talking about on OpenMSX. This script supports PSG and FMPAC. Depending on the quality of the m3u file with the KSS file your 'converting' process will be easy or hard. :) Also: a little bit more info about the Grauw tool.

vgmrips.net already has some SCC VGM packs too, don't know how those were created, maybe using MESS? This seems to have a VGM ripper as well.. have to investigate...