michy / ipatix
Many people who know me personally may not recognize one of my internet names. For my talk I will switch into the role of ipatix. This name has existed for a long time and I used that nick when I was doing ROM hacking during the 2010s. I liked to mess around with GBA Pokémon games in an awesome German hacking community back then. From basically knowing nothing it turned out to be quite a bit of a trampoline into the topics of game consoles, programming, reverse engineering, technology, and more specifically audio technology.
Back then very few people in the GBA community understood how sound worked and I took that as a challenge to dig deeper. While I definitely wasn't the first one to reverse engineer the GBA sound ecosystem, some people would probably say that I had my influential role on it. I have released multiple tools and mods, which have found their way into many GBA ROM hacks created by other people. I also released a somewhat popular GBA music ripping tool called "agbplay".
Since then my interests have shifted a bit, and while I'm still down for reverse engineering work, these days my focus is more on music technology in general, electronics, and other cool random things.
Beitrag
Game soundtracks shape the way we experience playing games. On the Game Boy Advance (GBA) quite a few popular titles were released and some of them do have very well known soundtracks. People sometimes like them for their '16 bit sound', which is of course a misleading description at best. But if it's not '16 bit sound', what makes those games sound the way they sound? How does the sound on the GBA actually work? In this talk we discuss what the GBA hardware is capable of, how most games used the so called "Music Player 2000" software to make those iconic GBA soundtracks. how to modify music in GBA games, and how we can use that knowledge to rip music from those games. To Nintendo's misfortune the Music Player 2000 was also used to discover the first GBA BIOS exploit, which we will cover of course.