.hes Music Archive (Kaminaron or otherwise)

[esteban]

BOTTOM LINE: I want to find (or create) the "ideal" .hes archive (organized by composer, complete* meta data, etc.)

*Well, as "complete" as humanly possible


Backstory: I have been trying to squeeze some more life (and performance) from my ancient laptop and deleted tons of non-essential files (I backed-up the rest).

Stupidly, I deleted the Kaminaron .hes Music Archive, which, sadly, is no longer available at http://namida.com/kaminarimon/ (I suppose it was bound to happen, but why now?).

Kaminari (and others) had taken the time to organize the .hes files and add missing meta data (composer, year, etc.).

I have these humble requests:

(1) Does anyone have a copy of the most recent .hes archive? (Kaminaron or otherwise...)

(2) Does anyone know if there is a community of folks who are actively adding new .hes rips  (and editing meta data) to create an "exhaustive" archive of .hes files?

FLEETING MEMORIES: I know that some folks here (covell, tomaithous (I have a hard time following all the monikers...Bonknuts? ) have ripped .hes files from CD-ROM games in recent years.

Download II .hes files, for example... (covell).
I know tomaithous did some stuff, too (sound effects and a little tune from a "badass"-looking platformer whose title escapes me at the moment. The protagonist in the game reminds me (vaguely) of Chakan. It is not a often-discussed game, the controls are kinda tricky (IIRC).

Over at magicengine, I remember *****freak (?) or ****shriek (?) was really ripping a lot of chiptunes (on many platforms, including PCE).


Thank you in advance .



P.S. If there is no UP-TO-DATE, exhaustive "official home" for .hes files/archives, well, I'll create a page at tg-16.com and host the files. We need to have a convenient, informative resource for this stuff.

I'm not talking about the ancient stuff (i.e. Zophar's)...

[grahf]

Oh no! I just checked and I don't have them either... I think it would be an awesome idea to create your own page, though. Even if we have to start from scratch, it would be worth it just to have everything categorized.

[ccovell]

Kingshriek has a good HES page:  http://snesmusic.org/hoot/kingshriek/

Dunno if it has ALL PCE rips, but it is moderately up-to-date.

I can e-mail my HES set to someone to check for completeness of older (HuCard) rips.

[Bonknuts]

Here are two that I publicly released:
http://www.pcedev.net/hes/UnrealSuperhero3.zip
http://www.pcedev.net/hes/6280_on_fire.zip

 They play correctly on mednafen (newest WIP builds of the past year) and the real system. Some other HES players don't play them exactly right (Ootake ver 2.64, NESplug 0.9.4.8 for winamp, and pretty bad in Magic Engine) :/ They also sound ok in PCEjin (it's a windows GUI build of mednafen, but the PSG filtering isn't as good as the original mednafen build).

[grahf]

What do you guys think about the quality of Game_music_emu?
http://slack.net/~ant/libs/audio.html#Game_Music_Emu

And I can't believe I missed Kingshriek's page before now. Pretty nice collection of CD HES rips.

I haven't really listened to a lot of Megadrive/Genesis stuff, but there seems to be a pretty amazing collection at http://project2612.org . It would be awesome if we had something like that for the PCE, esteban. There have been collections in the past, but they were always lacking categorization by composer, track names, etc.

[SuperPlay]

Hi esteban

I have a good chunk of them, missing some of the SCD files though.

[Bonknuts]

What do you guys think about the quality of Game_music_emu?
http://slack.net/~ant/libs/audio.html#Game_Music_Emu

And I can't believe I missed Kingshriek's page before now. Pretty nice collection of CD HES rips.

I haven't really listened to a lot of Megadrive/Genesis stuff, but there seems to be a pretty amazing collection at http://project2612.org . It would be awesome if we had something like that for the PCE, esteban. There have been collections in the past, but they were always lacking categorization by composer, track names, etc.

 I tried and do use blargg's player for HES stuff. It's also nice in that it's loud (compared to other players) and also has the option to enable/disable individual channels. The filtering is also perfect (band-limited step synthesis pretty damn clever). If you write a pretty exotic sound engine though, GME might not support it - but otherwise all game HES rips seem to play fine in it.

[grahf]

Good to know, Bonknuts. I've been using Audacious to listen to PCE stuff on Linux, which uses that engine. Your stuff sounds great to my ear, but I didn't know if I was missing out on anything.

[esteban]

Thank you for all your responses thus far.

Looks like I have some work to do .

I'll be getting in touch with some of you... I have been slowly looking at some OLD backups to see if I can recover anything I can use as a baseline (reference point).

[grahf]

I think between us forum members here we can do the entire library, including composers and track lists (where names are available). I can help with researching the Japanese stuff, when it gets to that point.

[esteban]

I think between us forum members here we can do the entire library, including composers and track lists (where names are available). I can help with researching the Japanese stuff, when it gets to that point.

I have been swamped at work, but, I am in 100% agreement with you!  Between you, me and everyone else...we should be able to put something together .

Anyone who is interested in helping or has already started working on a project like this should definitely join in our conversation .

[spenoza]

Hey, would someone who things they have a discriminating ear tell me how the Nezplug++ plugin for Winamp found here compares to the Blargg's player?

[grahf]

I Don't have a Windows machine here to try Nezplug++, unfortunately.

I just wanted to point out that for those wanting to test Blarrg's engine, Audacious looks like it has a Windows port as well. http://audacious-media-player.org/ It's a pretty solid player.

----

Esteban, what's the plan so far? I was thinking that a wiki style page might be a great way to do it, if we make sure everything is checked for accuracy.
As far as rips, go, where to start? Specific publisher? alphabetically? release date?

[roflmao]

Here's a link to a download for Dragon Spirit I recently used Nezplug++ and Winamp to rip.  I've since switched over to the most recent version pointed out here, but honestly, I can't tell the difference.

[Zeon]

Go figure, I was searching for some .hes rips I had been meaning to grab for a while/lost, and google turns me to here. While I have a number of the playlist files containing meta data and harder to find rips, I'm missing a lot. Arc-nova.org at one point had the most complete archive of .hes rips I found, but like Kaminaron, it seems they are all lost: http://www.arc-nova.org/chiptunes/files.php?type=HES . I did find a ftp server that seems like a good starting place for the later/harder to find rips that Kaminaron and Arc-nova once held, figured I'd share the info since I was passing this way: ftp://lan.oxfordinspire.co.uk/pub/mirrors/modland/pub/modules/HES/ . Alternatively: http://web.archive.org/web/20051215113430/http://namida.com/kaminarimon/hes/ Links seem to be working, but I haven't checked them all, not sure if that represents the last rips to be uploaded there either, but it's better than nothing at all.

Looks like only 6 survived: http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://namida.com/kaminarimon/hes/*

I think I found something better: http://hes.joshw.info/