[No] About VGZ/VGM arcade music compatibility

[Archie Genninggold]

So I've been experimenting with different music formats for GZDoom, and I've had success with .vgz tracks extracted from Genesis games so far. The sounds do play alright.

I then tried doing the same with arcade soundtracks I found from vgrips.com. Namely: http://vgmrips.net/packs/pack/armed-pol ... -toaplan-2. Same format, so I expected it to work. I wasn't able to get any sound. I tested the tracks on winamp together with the in_vgm plugin. Both the Genesis and arcade tracks work, which I can only assume means there are no differences in the way the files are handled. Tried to mess around with the vgm tools provided in the Project2612 website, decompressing and recompressing but nope. No nothing.

I assume I'm missing something incredibly simple, any ideas?

[Shadow Hog]

I'm pretty sure that's because that's all that Game Music Emu had implemented when ZDoom added it. (I think it has YM2151 support as well, so some of those arcade VGMs might work, although I wouldn't bet on it. You can check which chip a set's using by right-clicking the entry in Winamp's playlist and clicking "View File Info..."; the chips used will be in the upper-right of the window that comes up.)

From what I can tell, blargg no longer works on GME, but somebody else is picking up the reins, and has implemented a few of the arcade chips in question. I have no idea how applicable it is to ZDoom, however.

EDIT: Er, actually, my mistake, it appears there are two branches off of blargg's original version, and that one doesn't implement the arcade music. I meant to link kode54's take, which does.

[Gez]

Interesting.

[clint9000]

Thank you very much for the detailed response!

So I guess this is only a matter of ZDoom updating the library in question. There's a world of quality music that just sits there unused! Is there any way to formally request this, besides writing here, I mean?

[NeuralStunner]

kode54

That's a name I recognize! His fork gets my vote, for what it's worth.

[StrikerMan780]

Yeah, definitely supporting upgrading the library. The new version is so much better.

[_mental_]

I'm not an expert in licensing, but some parts of VGMPlay are under GPL. I don't think it can be used with ZDoom.

[StrikerMan780]

I don't believe this even uses VGMPlay.

EDIT: It doesn't. And the license is LGPL for GME.

[_mental_]

I'm talking about this branch, not the master.

[Shadow Hog]

I'm admittedly more than a little out of my depth when it comes to licensing. From what I've gathered, GPL code is disallowed from being used in proprietary software while LGPL is not. But even then, ZDoom has GPL code in it vis-à-vis fraggle's FraggleScript code, and that's apparently okay because we got permission on the condition that "the source code remains open and the full copyright notice remains in place"?

(Incidentally, this is turning into more of a feature request than a bug; maybe it should be moved over there?)

[Gez]

Fraggle, as the author of the code original to SMMU, is the one person who can choose the terms of how he licenses it. He's the one who chose to make it GPL in the first place, and he's allowed to dual-license it under an informal license of strict open-sourcedness and accreditation.

You can do that for any codebase; but keep in mind that if three hundred different people have worked on it, then you will need the okay from every single one of these three hundred people -- let's hope all of them are still alive!

[Shadow Hog]

I mean, I could ask ValleyBell about the licensing if you want, I know him from Sonic Retro - I just need to know what to ask, specifically.

Although looking over the VGMPlay commit list, he's hardly the only one to have worked on it.

[Graf Zahl]

To be honest, those who choose to license a library under the GPL either know precisely what they are doing, in which case there is no room for negotiation, or they are so clueless about licenses that their code is probably polluted anyway. I wouldn't hold too many hopes here.

[Kinsie]

I'd very much appreciate this and hope the individuals involved are as cool as Fraggle is about helping out an open-source project that's still sorting out a few long-term licensing kinks.