A while back, someone clued me in to an obscure, European - exclusive GBA game called Pinky and the Brain: The Master Plan. Some of the tracks were straight fire, so I had to figure out how to listen to them.
My first stop was YouTube. There's only one guy uploading, and the quality leaves much to be desired.
So, I set out to rip the music straight from the ROM. After many dead ends, I was able to get the tracks with:
A UNIX/LINUX setup. Maybe Windows is easier for you, or maybe you're normal like the rest of us. I find the command line far more intuitive, but as long as you have something to compile C++ with, cheers.
CMake-compiled gaxtapper executable (thank you, loveemu on GitHub) because the sound engine wasn't Sappy or Krawallar. It was also Gax 2.x, so I had to account for that as well.
As for listening to them, you're gonna need foobar2000 or a music player that handles .minigsf files. I plan on making converted MIDI copies if possible so I can mess around with mixing, but if you just want the music, stop here.
The first pass at ripping the songs fared well. For some reason, I can't put them in a different folder without a corruption warning in the player. So they're sitting in the build folder with the CMake files. Sometimes, software is straight wizardry.
But, they sound better than YouTube. I plan on extracting the songs again after messing with the constants in the gaxtapper files, and then seeing if I can make a thing or two out of all this.
The game itself seems pretty all right. I've only been viewing it through a debugging lens, but getting the ROM and a GBA emulator isn't too tricky if you wanna give it a spin.
Once this starts sounding nice, I'll see about uploading the songs. You might like them as well.
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Music credit goes to Manfred Linzner. It sucks that I only saw this after grabbing the songs, but the composer should get credit for coming up with this, right? Apparently he's composed for quite a few games using the Shin'en sound engine. Pretty cool stuff.