> The problem is that the "song" data in a console or arcade game isn't stored as MIDI, > or anything portable like that. The instructions are at a much lower level, and > you're basically not going to be able to take instructions written for one sound > chip, feed them to something else, and get back anything recognizable. It's kind of > similar to how code compiled for an x86 processor won't run on ARM (for example) and > vice versa.
Right. The song data generally starts out as MIDI, but ROM space costing what it did in the 80s and early 90s it's almost always converted into some specific format for the player program and sound hardware in use. You'd have to untangle that, *and* figure out what assumptions were specific to the 2612 "OPN" FM synth and convert them to the 2151 "OPM" synth. Real emulation old-timers will recall that MAME in the 0.2x era and early versions of Genecyst both attempted to translate FM data on the fly from the OPM/OPN chips the game used to the YM3812 OPL chip that was ubiquitous in PC soundcards. They will also recall that the results almost always sounded like someone waterboarding cats.
In this case it's not necessarily so dire because the 2151 is more capable than the 2612, but you're not going to get anything like an exact soundalike out of it.
|