It worked! Great! I know how to import a song!

But, wait, this song is cool and all, but I want some new music in my hack! I want to insert a MIDI!

Well, here we go. Let’s start all over again—let’s close and re-open Zahlman’s Song Editor just to refresh ourselves.

Before we continue, we need to apply a patch. This patch supplies us with basic MIDI instruments. You can find it here- http://www.feshrine.net/hacking/patches.html

But wait, thing is, this inserts data at a place, and it may very well overwrite some of your data. This is why I suggest you don’t apply this patch unless you have an unexpanded ROM, and if your ROM is expanded, that will be a problem, so this method will not work for you (D: D: D:).

Assuming you can apply the patch (use NUPS and make sure to hit ‘Notify’ on the left so that it bypasses the fact that the patch will most likely not match your file) we now have instruments to use so we can continue.

Let’s open our hack. ‘open romname’. Bam. Now, we need to convert a MIDI. ‘help convert’ tells us we need an offset for the instrument map (my patch takes care of that) and the name of the MIDI. I am a very simple person (lol), and have called my MIDI ‘cm’ for ‘custom music’.

I will give you the offset for the instrument map (since it comes with my patch): 0x11AE42C. So we must now type ‘convert 0x11AE42C cm’. We can now save our data to a binary file and load it later, or we can just burn straight to the ROM. I’m going to do the latter.

Like before, we need to know which song to repoint. I am going to use the same song as before in FE7—song 0x5A, the main theme. I’m using this because I can test the main theme right after I load the game. I got the offset I needed already by doing 0x5A x 8 + 69D6E0 = 69D9B0. I have empty space at 0xD50000 so I will insert my song there. So I type ‘burn 0x69D9B0 0xD50000’.

Now I save my ROM (‘close sc’) and test.

I hope it works for you, because it sure did work for me. It wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t expect it to be perfect, since the program is still a work in progress, and the MIDI I used wasn’t great either.

The tutorial on how to do it is a bit long, but get the hang of it and it’s a 1-to-3 minute job. Enjoy your new song! ^_^

Chapter 26: Exporting Music with gba2midi

There’s another way to import music from other games besides Shadowofchaos’ very hard method and the ZSE (Zahlman Song Editor) method.

You can use a program called GBA2MIDI to convert a song to a MIDI and then use my Elf Method tutorial to insert that MIDI. All I will do in this chapter is quickly teach you how to export a MIDI.

First, you need your game. It has to use the Sappy engine or this won’t work. You know that if you try and load your game and it doesn’t load/the program crashes, it is most likely because your game does not use this music format. It’s unfortunate, but it happens.

Anyway, first download GBA2MIDI from my site. Extract the files and open it up. You should see the following-

First, let’s load the ROM. Hit the “…” at the top right to browse for the file and select it. Then, using the browse button right underneath it, choose a generic file that the MIDI will be exported to. No matter which song you choose, the MIDI will ALWAYS be called this. Keep this in mind. Your screen should look something like this (but perhaps with a different game).

Next, use the arrow keys next to ‘OFS:’ to choose which song to play. If you’re not sure which one to use, you can try ‘convert’ (make sure you have ‘Play at once’ checked) and listen to the song. To stop it, press the “Play/Stop” button. The same thing to play it again.

The ‘list’ and ‘help’ buttons probably won’t be too useful to you. The ‘list’ button can be used to supply your own offset for a song table to the program, but the program has its own way of locating the song table, so that shouldn’t be necessary. We already know what every other button does except for the ‘close’ button which simply closes the program.

Now for the checkboxes:

Play at once – plays the song right after conversion.

Output Instruments – outputs the instruments used in the song as WAVs in a subfolder. Useful if you wanted to import the instruments, but it’s not very easy to do something like that manually, so if you want to import instruments from another game, you’re going to need ZSE (no way to get everything in one package, huh?).

Optimize for XG – sort of alters the instruments used and stuff. Hard to explain what it changes, but you can hear the difference. It often times affects drums.

Extract sequence data – I’m not too sure what this is, actually, nor am I too curious about it.

Minimal conversion – same as above. I don’t know everything, lol.

When you convert a song it’ll output as whatever you told it to output. I suggest renaming the exported MIDI and then you can use it for whatever you want—if you’re a hacker, then that most likely means you will insert the MIDI into another game.

You’d only really use this method if ZSE was not able to export the tracks because the tracks were unsupported. Otherwise, ZSE > GBA2MIDI. That’s it for this chapter. =D