PlayStation Development Network

Hello everyone,

FIrst i’d like to mention that I have no knowledge in coding whatsoever. I’m just a musician & very fond of some PSX games soundtracks; especially FF7.

From what i’ve read on the Playstation SPU, the sounds (violins, drums, guitar…) in Final Fantasy VII are not pre-recorded but come from the sound chip. My question is, how does Nobuo Uematsu make the console produce the sounds he composed? Why do the violins in the FF7 OST sound like they do? And… is there a way to access these “virtual instruments” one way or another?

If this is impossible, I intend to sample them note-per-note from the channels in the .psf files of the OST, which I read in audio overload.

Still, the process of implementing music in retro games (especially PSX) is intriguing and remains a mystery to me.
Could anybody clarify it for me?

Thank you very much!

They play them like like a tracker does on the Amiga for example. The PSX SPU has channels which can play high quality samples. Using clever code, you can swap them out quickly from working memory to SPU memory, thus giving you a dynamic range of music or audio effects.

You can extract them using the right tools if need be, but sometimes they use a custom format so you'll need to figure out how to decode them in order to extract them.

http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=6571.0

https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index. ... ic=23229.0

http://sdamo.io/ff7/index.php

You may also check Nisto's psfisolate.

Thanks everyone for the quick replies; I'm checking this out.