Problem with Music on some games with Ubuntu 10.04 / Kega Fusion

[kildagin]

Hello,

I stumbled across your forum looking for help with an issue I am having with the audio (music only) playing games with Kega Fusion 3.63x. I am running Ubuntu 10.04, if that matters. During my search, I saw instances where others had problems like mine, where the sound effects worked find but the voice and background music tracks did not work. The difference in my case, is that is seems to vary from game to game. The sound/music on lunar 2 eternal blue works fine, the music and voice on dark wizard and Vay work fine. But, the first lunar game, Sonic CD, and Snatcher, all refuse to play the audio tracks. The machine does recognize the tracks, when you hit A at the load screen to switch to the CD player, it displays the proper amount of tracks, but none of them will play. The mp3 files themselves seem to be fine, as my normal mp3 player plays them without issue. I am stumped. Anyone have any insight? Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks

Kildagin

[The Jackal]

I've just run into this myself. I know I've got it right as the tracks are listed in the OSD, but they refuse to produce any sound. Game SFX plays fine.

[Barone]

Kega Fusion is not optimized for the Linux AFAIK and as I remember from my XO developer days it really sucks on the Linux.
I'd give Gens/GS (http://segaretro.org/Gens/GS) a try instead.

And, by the way, Ubuntu is for suckers.

[Bottino]

Get Gens for Ubuntu; as far as i remember, the Sega-CD games work fine on it.

Also, don't use ISO/mp3 games; those are terrible.
Try to find proper Bin/Cue image rips, especially from Darkwater and Redump.

[Chaniyth]

Get Gens for Ubuntu; as far as i remember, the Sega-CD games work fine on it.

Also, don't use ISO/mp3 games; those are terrible.
Try to find proper Bin/Cue image rips, especially from Darkwater and Redump.

ALL of the entire Gens family of emulators suck balls for sound, it's HORRIBLE. Kega Fusion has as close to actual hardware sound as you can get with emulation when you enable SuperHQ, period.

Though I do agree, those ISO/mp3 dumps are pure garbage. Totally use Bin/Cue or better yet, just buy the damn games, most Sega CD games are cheap [from local retro game shops].

[Chibisteven]

ALL of the entire Gens family of emulators suck balls for sound, it's HORRIBLE. Kega Fusion has as close to actual hardware sound as you can get with emulation when you enable SuperHQ, period.

Though I do agree, those ISO/mp3 dumps are pure garbage. Totally use Bin/Cue or better yet, just buy the damn games, most Sega CD games are cheap [from local retro game shops].

While Fusion is the best all round emulator for playing games... It doesn't emulate the PSG as good as some more recent emulators and doesn't emulate the 32X PWN correctly at all, even dropping notes/samples, a special version of GENS does. Regen has better PSG emulation but drops notes in some games using the YM2612, noticeably Sonic 1's Labyrinth Zone. Lacks a lot of the features Fusion has as well, but has some Fusion does not.

The closet you can get to actual hardware is the Exodus emulator but it requires a fast computer. This is geared more towards programmers.

Neither Exodus or Regen can play SEGA CD/MEGA CD or 32X games, just mentioned for emulating the Genesis/Mega Drive itself. Gens does not like Bin/Cues

As for YM2612 artifacts, yes those can be emulated as well, at the cost of increasing processor usage a bit. Even lowpass filtering of amps can be correctly emulated at the cost of more CPU usage. If you know the exact sound characteristics of something you can actually recreate it. Factors like harmonic distortion, bit truncation, crosstalk between the left and right channels to name a few.

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Tip to the Original Poster: You can easily create a bin/cue of any SEGA CD game you own or buy. No special hardware required. Just a good properly working CD-ROM drive and a program that will create them correctly is all you need. There is some freeware out there that has that capability. Unlike ROMs or later CD-based games, MEGA CD/SEGA CD games are pretty easy to create bin/cues to use with emulators.

[midnightrider]

ALL of the entire Gens family of emulators suck balls for sound, it's HORRIBLE. Kega Fusion has as close to actual hardware sound as you can get with emulation when you enable SuperHQ, period.

Gens/GS actually sounds leagues better than the core Gens. The only reason I dumped it for Fusion is that backgrounds didn't look right in Skitchin'. Almost everything else I played seemed perfectly fine though. Except, I don't know if it has a fix for something like Scooby Doo, without temporarily turning off a layer of sound you'll need to remember to turn back on for other games.

[The Jackal]

Kega Fusion is not optimized for the Linux AFAIK and as I remember from my XO developer days it really sucks on the Linux.
I'd give Gens/GS (http://segaretro.org/Gens/GS) a try instead.

And, by the way, Ubuntu is for suckers.

Cheers. I'll give that one a go. What's so bad about Ubuntu then? Unity? I swapped that out for KDE Plasma a while back lol.

As for my issue, I swapped over to Windows 7 and the game loads up with music playing just fine.

Though I do agree, those ISO/mp3 dumps are pure garbage. Totally use Bin/Cue or better yet, just buy the damn games, most Sega CD games are cheap [from local retro game shops].

I actually do own and play my real copies, it's just in this case, I was using Sonic Megamix, which is a hack.

[Barone]

What's so bad about Ubuntu then?

Its community sucks to no end IMO.
Ubuntu people are sad people. The Ubuntu guy at work is that guy who knows shit about what he's doing but thinks he's smart.
The Ubuntu developer is the worst possible developer: he has political correctness up his ass, knows shit about programming, thinks java is efficient and he thinks he's THE cool guy.

Also, the "Linux for Human Beings" slogan means that the distribution is made for pussies, by pussies.
Linux wasn't conceived for human beings, it was conceived for intelligent people not intelligent enough to use Unix and Ubuntu pretty much ruins everything that was right about the Linux premise.

Yeah, I'm one of those asshats who was used to Slackware. Ubuntu is just an inferior race that should never ever existed, sorry.

Unity? I swapped that out for KDE Plasma a while back lol.

Good move.

As for my issue, I swapped over to Windows 7 and the game loads up with music playing just fine.

Of course, in Windows there's no politically correct faggot penguins fucking up your tasks with free world bullshit; that's why the music plays just fine./rant

[The Jackal]

I only use Ubuntu because it's free tbh. I use my PC as a multi media centre and XBMC runs better on Ubuntu than W7 with my rig. Don't use it for anything else. I was thinking of trying Mint though - that any good?

[Barone]

Don't care about my rant, I was kinda joking too. IDK Mint but I've heard good things about it.
For a multi media centre Ubuntu is a good choice.

[Chilly Willy]

Try Xubuntu - all the good parts of Ubuntu without the bad (substituting XFCE in its place). Personally, I use Xubuntu because XFCE is a nice light window manager, and the ubuntu part means I don't have to spend a lot of time on the OS part, I can keep my mind on development. 99.9% of the time, I can ignore the OS. I used to use Fedora, but it was pretty high maintenance - I spent more time on the OS than developing.

Kega Fusion might be a better emulator, but there's no way to work on the parts that don't work. One bad thing in particular is the linux version was never updated to the latest version - it's 3.63 vs 3.64 for the Windows build. While working on the 32X, I found things that didn't work. Gens/GS r7 works... maybe not the best, but it's open source, so I could post fixes for anything I ran into. So I use Gens/GS more than Fusion. Of course, nothing works better than real hardware, so I run my stuff on real hardware more often than under emulation.