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Paprium VGM : a software synthesizer based on MCU STM32

Technical discussion which is not directly related to VGM files. Talk about Hardware and Software.

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  • Laborat Offline
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  • Joined: 2025-07-29, 17:30:18

Paprium VGM : a software synthesizer based on MCU STM32

Post by Laborat »

Hello,

The emulation of the game has been available for a few weeks now...

Original dump :
https://archive.org/download/s-29-gl-06 ... paprium-us

(adapted ROM msu-md +cores) :
https://archive.org/download/not_paprium_retroarch


Playing current music with actual emulation (RetroArch core and flashcart) his not the one originally designed by the game (approach "MSU-MD" for emulation therefore), some of this is a great success for the preservation, but now it is a also a great technical challenge for reading as for the real cartridge (specific features, quality and authenticity).

Here we're talking a little bit about it: https://www.emu-land.net/forum/index.ph ... msg1647438

I quote @stargazer :
STM32F446 contains only 512kB of internal flash memory. There's no serial memory onboard, except 64kBit EEPROM used for saves.
So, it's impossible to store pre-mastered soundtrack (400+ MBytes) even with lossy compression format, like mp3.
Most likely, sound is generated procedurally by software synthesizer inside ARM controller, but since it's firmware is not dumped, sound output from cartridge was recorded and converted to mp3 tracks for emulation purposes.
Theoretically, it's possible that input data for synthesizer is stored inside main ROM flash, but since it's format and inner workings of synthesizer is unknown, this wouldn't help much even if this is the case.
Not bad, right ?

Details are files here that can give ideas :
https://www.emu-land.net/forum/index.ph ... msg1649274