VisualBoyAdvance-M

VBA-M has a problem with the sound in the GBA game Telefang 2. With the exception of the music in the intro that you see when you first turn the game on, as well as the title screen music, all the songs in this game are messed up. One of the channels doesn't sound right at all. It is either not heard at all, or it sounds really buggy (and this behavior seems to be random and does whatever it wants).

 

I am using build 781 (though I've seen -- er, heard -- this problem in earlier builds of VBA-M as well). The sound settings are all default -- but the sound is messed up whether I change them or not.

 

I haven't seen this problem in VBA 1.7.2 (or its TAS fork), 1.8.0, or 1.7.3. Which means that if you want to hear how the game is SUPPOSED to sound like, use one of these versions (preferably 1.7.2, as it seems to be the most accurate for GBA games) to listen to the music.

 

Oh, and I tried a few other GBA games, and they do NOT have the same problem as Telefang 2 does.

 

(It's funny because the first Telefang game actually sounds better in VBA-M than in any other version of VBA.)

 

EDIT: Forgot to upload a save file (apparently I'm supposed to do this when reporting a bug). Here's a complete save of the Power Version (does NOT work on Speed Version!). Since the game is complete, you have access to all areas, and therefore you can listen to a lot of the music. To run, hold down the R button. (I had to mention that because not many of you have likely played, let alone heard of, this game.)

 

I had to make the file a ZIP file because it wouldn't let me upload SAV files.

you wouldn't happened to have transpatched it?

 

since its japanese only..... a patch might have buggered the audio up.

I was wondering if anybody would ever acknowledge this...

 

I do have an IPS patch that partially translates the game from Japanese to English, and yes, the save is influenced by the patch, but I'm still having problems even without using any IPS patch. I deleted the sav file, unchecked Auto-apply IPS/UPS/PPF, and still have the same issues. Here is a save state, in case it has anything to do with the sound settings:

 

 

Again, only works for Power Version.

 

Notice the sound difference? I do. It's like night and day.

 

Since these save states are from brand new save files, I did not get very far, so there are less songs to listen to. If you want to cheat to go anywhere you want, try playing with RAM address 0x03004FA0 (Power Version) or 0x03004F90 (Speed Version).

 

By the way, some time after I made this thread, I noticed that Telefang 2 has sound problems in almost every GBA emulator, not just VBA-M... and in every emulator I tried, it sounds different. Maybe Telefang 2 has some unique sound chip that is hard to support, or maybe Telefang 2 is so obscure that emulators weren't designed with it in mind? Here's a thread I made about this on a Telefang forum that I have -- according to people who have the game, VBA 1.7.2 is the most accurate emulator in emulating Telefang 2's sound. So, what does VBA 1.7.2 do right that VBA-M doesn't?

I don't hear anything out of the ordinary, what you might be hearing is that channel 4 has been fixed from its broken state in 1.7.2....

There is definitely an issue with Telefang 2's music. The intro and theme music sound fine, but everything else is a crapshoot. I recorded two examples of the menu music, one from VBAlink (it's the version I happen to use most often) and one from VBA-M.

 

http://wikifang.meowcorp.us/etc/vbalink180b.mp3

http://wikifang.meowcorp.us/etc/vbamsvn926.mp3

 

It seems to turn this behavior on and off; after one loop it would stop, switching music ingame would start it up again, then it would stop when I opened a VBA menu, etc.

This appears to be an extreme edge case situation, where you either get it right(for this game only) and break something(everything?) else, or get it wrong and everything else is fine.

I might be jumping the gun here, but Kode54 has provided a single line change that has corrected both the garbling and volume issues on my end.

 

Anyone available with telefang2 or other affected games to test?

You guys definitely did something right; the sound in Virtual Kasparov that I have always known to sound garbled in VBA sounds smooth and straight in this build.

 

The only problem I had was that the sound was all hyped at first, but only because the throttle feature was broken. Try using throttle for 100% speed; I get like 256%, Jesus. 50% ? still 256%, damn you.

 

No throttle / disabled? Works great.

I tried out the newest version of VBA-M, and Telefang 2 definitely sounds better now. Thanks so much for fixing it!