mappinghell now hosting vgmrips

[vampirefrog]

Hello friends!

Just wanted to announce that I am now hosting http://vgm.mdscene.net

It is a forum dedicated to music rips from retro game consoles and arcade machines. VGM stands for Video Game Music, and is a binary file format for storing ripped music, but also a larger community related to that retro sound.

The story is that I was (and still am) working on a project related to video game music, and I needed some help with converting to the VGM format, so I met ValleyBell, who is maintaining and developing the VGM format and player and winamp plugin, and many other things, then I joined their IRC and their forum, and when it was announced that the person hosting the forum will no longer host it, I offered to host it myself.

After I started to host it, I already added a chatbox similar to the one on MH, and I'm also working on a database to store the VGM meta-data and display it in a more elaborate fashion than just plain forum posts.

Anyway, if you're into retro game music or just good music (some of the games have sweeeeeeeeet musics), visit the vgmrips forum and enjoy!

[Sweet]

Awesome!

[unixfreak]

Hey that's awesome. I could browse the sega section for hours....
I don't know much about it, but is it like ROM dumps? Just, only the music parts? Or are they processed?

Curious, cause i know most emulators don't play back the true sounds. IE; Sonic the hedgehog on sega mega drive sounds different when you play it through an emulator (pitch and tone changes etc). Would be awesome to listen to the music tracks as they actually sounded.

[vampirefrog]

VGM files [ see here ] are basically logs of commands sent to sound chips. I suppose if you want to hear the music as close to the real thing as possible you have two options: 1. The real thing 2. Audio recordings of the real thing's sound output. However, the VGM files are data for sound chip emulators (not console emulator, just the sound chip part). IE the data sent by the CPU to the sound chip. I guess the real hardware might have some extra filtering on the raw sound chip output. AFAIK, it depends on the emulator as well. Kega Fusion is rumored to have the best sound emulation. To my knowledge, perfect emulation is possible, because all of the hardware can be emulated, not just the sound chip.