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Need Help on Choosing Roland SC-55

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Reply 20 of 28, by derSammler

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Really? We have threads here telling the opposite. The way it works was changed after 1.21 and was eventually removed. Maybe it was not fully removed until the Mk.II, but it was limited in 2.x so much that it no longer produced the same output as in earlier ROMs.

Last edited by derSammler on 2020-02-21, 17:09. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 21 of 28, by Cloudschatze

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I've tested and posted about this myself. There are some specific changes with drum set "fallback" between 1.xx and 2.xx units, but the fallback of capital tones behaves exactly the same on both.

Just to clarify though, since it seems to be a source of confusion, an SC-55 with 2.xx ROM is NOT an SC-55mkII. The SC-55mkII indeed does not feature capital-tone fallback.

Reply 22 of 28, by Oetker

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Yes there's the drum set fallback, and from what I've gathered the 1.x units perform a GS reset instead of a GM reset and 2.x firmware fixes this, but some games depend on the wrong behaviour.

Reply 23 of 28, by Joseph_Joestar

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Cloudschatze wrote on 2020-02-21, 17:09:

I've tested and posted about this myself. There are some specific changes with drum set "fallback" between 1.xx and 2.xx units, but the fallback of capital tones behaves exactly the same on both.

Just to clarify though, since it seems to be a source of confusion, an SC-55 with 2.xx ROM is NOT an SC-55mkII. The SC-55mkII indeed does not feature capital-tone fallback.

How does the SC-155 fit into the picture with regards to the drum set fallback issue? From what little information I found, it seems to be using the 2.xx. ROM, or am I wrong? I'm asking because I found a SC-155 locally for a fairly reasonable price, but I'm not sure if I should grab it or wait for a different model instead.

I guess my question is, are there going to be issues with any games when using a SC-155?

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 24 of 28, by DNSDies

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If you're only using it for games, any version of the SC-55 is going to work fine.
If you want to do more interesting stuff like loading Gameboy Advance music files into it to create high-quality remasters of them, you'll want an SC-88 Pro.
See this for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXx0IWcNw_s

Reply 25 of 28, by Joseph_Joestar

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DNSDies wrote on 2021-02-02, 05:13:

If you're only using it for games, any version of the SC-55 is going to work fine.
If you want to do more interesting stuff like loading Gameboy Advance music files into it to create high-quality remasters of them, you'll want an SC-88 Pro.

I would primarily be using the SC-155 for DOS gaming.

Basically, I'd like to know if there are games where using a different SC-55 model would be better. To clarify, I only care about GS/GM and don't intend to use the MT-32 compatibility mode.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 26 of 28, by jheronimus

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DNSDies wrote on 2021-02-02, 05:13:

If you're only using it for games, any version of the SC-55 is going to work fine.
If you want to do more interesting stuff like loading Gameboy Advance music files into it to create high-quality remasters of them, you'll want an SC-88 Pro.
See this for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXx0IWcNw_s

This is something I did not expect to exist outside PCs... I mean, you can't just use an emulator to run every game with an external MIDI device/engine, right?

MR BIOS catalog
Unicore catalog

Reply 27 of 28, by DNSDies

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jheronimus wrote on 2021-02-02, 08:10:

This is something I did not expect to exist outside PCs... I mean, you can't just use an emulator to run every game with an external MIDI device/engine, right?

This is actually taking a rom, and ripping the midi file and soundfont from it, then loading it into a midi player with the output being the SC-88 Pro, and ignoring the soundfont.
Since Golden Sun was originally composed with an SC-88, this means the soundfont on the rom is an EXTREMELY compressed, low quality version of the sounds used on an SC-88.
If you load the midi in, and fix the instrument assignments and eq/reverb etc levels, you can re-create the music from the game on a real SC-88 in high quality, exactly as it would have sounded when it was composed.
Many GBA games had music made with an SC-88.

I suppose it would be possible to replace the midi files in a GBA rom with these fixed versions and make an emulator that routes soundbank address calls to an external midi device, though.
In fact, if you know which channel is which instrument in the soundfont, you could maybe make a program that automatically fixes all the midi files to match the SC-88 map instead of the internal GBA one.

Reply 28 of 28, by digistorm

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Are you sure about that? Last time I read about it, I seem to remember it used a proprietary format and some of the instruments use the gameboy classic chip instruments. Though I am sure it would have been engineered on a midi platform and just used an export function that converts the sc-88 based midi project to samples and music data. I am referring to this discussion online: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=18534.0

They refer to the music engine from that game as the Sappy sound engine, and although you may be able to use the same ripper to rip modi’s from similar games, there were other systems too based on Impulse Tracker for example. You would also need to back engineer what original instruments were used for each game. So not really a general method for all GBA games.