Winamp functionality I was unaware of until now... o_O

[kane_magus]

Holy fucking shit. After all the decades I've been using Winamp, I had no fucking clue until now that you could simply change its output via the "Nullsoft Disk Writer" plugin to write to a file instead of playing to speaker as normal. At first, I only had .wav available for output, which still would have been okay, since I could have manually converted them to .mp3 with Audacity, but then I found that it was an ludicrously simple thing to install the proper LAME codec so that Winamp would output them as .mp3 files directly, instead of just .wav files. Apparently, it will do the same with .flac or whatever as well, if that's more your cup of tea these days and you have the proper codec and all. I'm more old school and prefer .mp3, myself.

Anyway, the upshot to all of this is that I can now simply load all those video game files (e.g. .spc files for SNES music) and convert them to mp3 soundtracks super easy now (and, as a result, listen to said soundtracks a lot more frequently than I have in the past). Granted, you need to already have the proper plugins and dll files and shit to let Winamp play those kind of things in the first place, but I've had that shit for years. I'd done some spc->mp3 conversions and such in the past, but it was always kind of like pulling teeth, as I'd had to jump through esoteric hoops to do it in a more manual, hands-on kind of way. No longer.

It took maybe 10-15 minutes (if even that much, since I wasn't really keeping a close eye on the time) for Winamp to convert the entire three and half hour long EarthBound .spc gamerip soundtrack into .mp3 files (189 files total, a lot of which are just sound effect shit that I'll probably delete... though I may find some use for some of those as alert noises on my new phone, maybe). That would have likely taken multiple hours if I'd done it the more manual way I used to do it. Fucking hell, I wish I'd known about this years ago. -_-;

Well then, in any case, I know what I'm probably going to be doing for the next day or so now. TomorrowLater today, though, as it's already well after 3:00am as I type this.

Comments

[owsf2000]

Oh, by the way you can export music to mp-... nevermind~

I knew about this ages ago myself although I didn't use it often. If you end up exporting nes tunes, send me a msg. ^_-

I personally stopped using winamp when I got either this or my last computer? I probably still have winamp2 kicking around in my archive though. I only really used that to listen to .sap files by the end of it. those being songs that used the pokey chip found in atari computers and the atari 7800. I haven't had too much incentive to reinstalling winamp 2 for that purpose since I have a Raster program now that can read/edit/create sap files. That and the sap player plugin for winamp 2 was a bit buggy feeling.

I had a bunch of other winamp 2 plugins for various file formats I believe, but at this point I can't remember what ones I had beyond that one.


On an unrelated note, I noticed on my games complete list on my webpage, I don't have any of the TMNT games officially completed. Took a quick stab at TMNT2 this weekend and got up to shredder on the second try but wasn't able to beat him - krang kept doing too much damage to me. ^^ I think this weekend I'll give a serious shot at both TMNT and TMNT 2 for the list. I've completed both ages ago, but not since I started the list back in 2008 which is a requirement for going on the list! Since I have both games in my collection, whynot.

[kane_magus]

I didn't even know there was a "Winamp 2" as I'm just using version 5.666 of Winamp... 1, I guess? ^^; Was Winamp 2 a separate thing, or was that just referring to version 2.0 of regular Winamp or something? There's also a version 5.8 now, but it had some minor issues (don't actually recall what, now, though), so I went back to 5.666, i.e. the last stable release, afaik.

Just before starting this reply, I tried ripping the nsf file for the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game, and it worked well enough, I guess. I was afraid it would try to rip them all into one large mp3 file, since the nsf file kind of plays as one file, but it actually managed to separate each track into separate mp3s, which is nice. However, the mp3s play at like double pitch and tempo, for some odd reason. I was able to load one of the files into Audacity and apply a -55% speed change on it to return it to normal (just straight -50% wasn't quite enough, strangely), but that's more work than I care to do on that sort of thing for the time being. I have an metric shit-ton of nsf files, though, so if you have any particular requests, I can look into it. Don't know if I have the music for every NES game every released, but it's probably close.

After that, I tried to rip the music for the Game Boy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan game, and it did the same thing, except that the pitch and tempo were off by a lesser amount, i.e. adjusting it by -9.0% was enough to fix it. That's annoying, but not insurmountable, I guess. Would've been a lot better if it just ripped them the way they actually sound when you play them normally, obviously, but whatever. Also, every single track, for both nsf and gbs files, are all exactly 5:05 long originally, even for one-second long sound effects. However, that could be a way to make sure that the speed adjusted ones are exactly correct (or as close to that as I can get them), if the resulting track ends up as 5:05 again. That's a silver lining, I guess. (And then, with Audacity, I can just end them after a loop or two, and add a fade at the end, or else leave it so that they can play as a loop or whatever.)

Anyway...

TMNT 2 is the one based on the arcade game, right? That and the first game are the only ones I recall ever playing, at least on NES. I know there's at least one more NES TMNT game, but I've never played it. (I've played through Turtles in Time on SNES, and also played Tournament Fighters for a tiny bit, and I also owned the first two TMNT games on Game Boy back in the day.) I've technically beaten the first NES game using an emulator in more recent years, but never did on the original hardware, back when I used to go to my sister's house to play it. Turns out, though, that I had made it pretty much to the room right before Shredder when I was playing it as a kid. Those stupid flying rock soldiers or whatever they were always killed me before I could ever get to Shredder though (hint, as I found when playing it again years later on emulator: duck and hit downward as Donatello as they fly overhead, because unlike the other three Turtles, Donatello's ducking hit also hits upward a bit, and it will hit the rock soldier guys).

For TMNT 2, I played the shit out of that as a kid. Basically, for normal mook enemies like Foot Soldiers or whatever, the A+B special attack kills most of them in one hit. Honestly, after I'd played the game for a while and got pretty good at it, I don't think I ever used the normal attacks at all, unless it was by accident. For bosses (and, really, for pretty much anything that takes more than one hit to kill), the jump kick is king, as you can jump kick them and then immediately jump away, even using the jump kick again as a sort of speed boost in getting away. For some of the slower bosses, like Krang, you can almost-but-not-quite juggle them with repeated jump kicks, though they may still get the occasional hit on you as you jump away. For Shredder... I guess the strategy would be to try to stay the fuck behind him, especially when he rushes to the edge of the screen, because that's when he's about to unleash the one-hit-kill anti-mutagen gun.

[owsf2000]

Winamp 2 was just version 2 of Winamp - well before the version you're using. When they went to Winamp version 3, they broke all compatibility with Winamp 2 skins and plugins, and Winamp 3 was... rather horrid imo. So I ended up just staying with Winamp version 2. It did everything I needed it to do, and didn't gobble up cpu time like 3 did by comparison.

For TMNT 2, except for a few exceptions that's basically the only way to really play and expect to get anywhere. You can tell they expected players to play that way due to the changes from the arcade game, where the jump slash move would cost you hp unless you were at 1hp. In the NES game, it's the staple since enemies would be invulnerable for a second or three after being hit with a regular attack - plenty of time for them to start kicking your ass.

Jumpkicking the bosses is also staple yeah. The only kink is knowing the best angle to jumpkick them at. If you're too low or high you end up having a much larger chance of being countered. I can't quite remember where the best place to jumpkick Krang as it seems to be luck if he instantly kicks you in the back as soon as you land or not. You just gotta avoid the eye beam. Was trying to experiment with jump slashing him from slightly below, moving a bit lower each time so he has to keep walking into you, but it's real hard to time. At times you can get some massive damage done before you get sent flying by messing up the timing.

If the arcade version of TMNT2 (ie the original) ended up on the switch I'd probably buy it despite having the nes version. The entire game plays much differently.

For TMNT1, I figured out the Donatello thing back as a kid. However I also noticed that switching screens/maps always had the chance of changing the enemy types. So when you had those stupid ass hard mobs you could try spending some time going in and out of the map until you were served the weaker enemies. The only thing to be careful of is that if you destroy all the enemies on the screen - the enemy types could be swapped out on you. To prevent that I'd sometimes try to avoid as many of the enemies as I could, keeping one of them on the screen as I went.

The other tip for TMNT1 was to spend some time on stage 3 (city level) building up on the scrolls. Makes short work of bosses, including shredder. Of course that means you have to avoid dying!

If any of my scrolled up turtles died and I got them back later, I'd fill them up on boomerangs as a backup. Fun thing is that you can share boomerangs between turtles. Have the guy with the boomerang throw it, then change to a turtle without weapons to receive it. I don't think that works if they had something else like ninja stars. Great for giving some weapons to a newly rescued turtle if there's no good weapon powerups nearby.

For most of other games it's a bit hazy for me. Did play Turtles in Time a bunch, probably completed it. TMNT III I might have completed as well. Rented it several times back in the day. Played tournament some, and I remember playing one of the turtles games on gameboy back as a kid... I think I own one of them now actually...