GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Kode-Z]

Is it possible to somehow inject other N64 games' USF files into the GoldenEye ROM? This would be cool! Would this be a 021990 Edit?

[SubDrag]

Well, the concept of porting music isn't ridiculous, but even though it's standardized who knows the music formats in each game. Those usfs are basically ROMs stripped of all but music and music code.

[Kode-Z]

Just saw this in YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-wnxi1643E

Someone imported the 007 theme into SM64, via a converter which converts from MIDI to SM64's format.

Maybe it could be used for GE?

[Dragonsbrethren]

Probably not, the games more than likely use different formats for their music.

[radorn]

No, you can't import-export USF's across games.

In fact, even though the purpose of USF is to produce music, it's not really a music format in the strict sense of the word because it doesn't contain a standarized musical "score"(+samples). It's rather a selfcontained custom program with everything needed inside and it's meant to be RUN, rather than played.
USF's are ROM files that are extensively hacked in order to leave only the the necesary music playing code and data, and then the remainder is trimmed down and further hacking is done in order to have it not break.
A usf player is also a trimmed down N64 emulator.
The .usflib is what remaing after this distillation process and the .miniuf files are save states made by the ripper as a means of song selection. They set the emulator to the adecuate state for it to play the desired song.
Also, given how the N64 works, which lacks real audio hardware and uses software running on the coprocessor instead, there's nothing that is forced to stay common across games and each one can use their own custom format, methods and player software, making them incompatible.

Of course that doesn't mean there aren't games that share similar or even identical formats, specially if they come from the same developer, like what Kode-Z points to, but even then, samples are likely to be different so it won't sound the same.
Also, as Dragonsbrethren points, the format's are sure to be different and incompatible even if they are deciphered.

You would need to hack the formats of both origin and destination games and find a way to try to translate one into the other, which will probably introduce some losses if you find some feature in one of them which has no equivalent in the destination format. And then, again, you'd hit the problem of difering samples, which, so far, haven't been hacked completelly either. Some soundbank types are (partially) decodeable, but AFAIK there's no known encoder...

Resuming. Translating song across games in the n64 is not impossible, but it's a rather new territory, unless for what kode-z has shown, but USF's are not the way