Ripping my hair out trying to rip Tricky Doc by Tecfri

[MysteriousCM]

Ey guys, this is gonna be one heck of a ride when I tell you what's been going on between me and a certain arcade game from a dead Spanish game developer from 1987. I was interested in Tricky Doc, a game about a professor trying to spray his caged apparitions that escaped... with an aerosol can. But I wasn't here for the game though, I'm sure all of you might guess that its for the music, and you're right! It's just calm, and it feels like home (whilst a black-masked humanoid pig chases up against you). The real issue I've been facing is the unreliability of logging the VGM off the spot for attract and gameplay, because the music is brief and you can't capture most of it which is very inconvenient. I tried doing every ripper would do with an 8-bit based arcade game that DIDN'T have a sound test menu, finding the sound ID itself, and wouldn't you know it, it was a pain in the cinnamon buns to find them. I tried looking at $E000 or $E36C and all I could find are mid note-offs or hit scrambles, not the source. I'll admit here, I have no experience in finding the precise sound ID. Sure, ripping J.J. Squawkers, Magical Cat Adventure, and Banpresto's 1993 solid-slate kaiju tournament fighter Godzilla was easy because they had a sound test of their own which I could access, but when it comes to games like Tricky Doc, its really no small feat. If anyone can help with finding sound IDs in a game of monster chases the doc, it would be greatly appreciated!

[ValleyBell]

I just had a very quick look.

• There is no "sound trigger" in this game.
• Instead, the game sets register A = <sound ID>, then calls the function at $9D7B to play music or SFX.
• Z80 address where it starts the title song (sound ID $A9): $104F
• Z80 address where it starts the level BGM: $1DA3 (takes the level ID from $E6A0 and uses it as an index into the "level BGM list" at $1EB5)
• sound IDs for music and SFX are $81..$BF, but music and SFX seem to be mixed; sound ID $00 = stop

I could probably develop some sort of "sound test" that lets you call a specific sound by editing a byte in RAM, if need that.

[dmbnation41]

I was about to make a comment about how there were no Tecfri games created here...