Line of Fire (W) / Bakudan Yarou (J)

Generated by MAME 0.222 VGM mod
(mame0222-245-gad6505ba636-dirty).

The name of the game in Japan is a bit
confusing: most of the advertising and the OST
(discussed below) refer to it exclusively as
Line of Fire, but on the title screen it's
given the title Bakudan Yarou (with Line of
Fire possibly being a subtitle), and MAME also
calls it that in its database. (According to
Google Translate, "bakudan yarou" also
translates, word-by-word and loosely, to
"dynamite guy".) I've included both names in
the Japanese Game tag in the VGM files.

The only OST release was Hyper Drive -G.S.M.
SEGA 4- (PCCB-00035). With the exception of
Coin and Unknown Jingle, the song order and all
song names are from the OST. The two exceptions
are not included in the OST, but I included
them for parity with other packs on vgmrips.
Song title names on the OST are written in
English using the Latin alphabet; the Japanese
Title tags of the VGMs are thus left blank. The
OST also credits all music to Bluetz Lee; we
currently have that person pinned to Minoru
Aoki, so that is the name that appears in the
Composer tag.

There is a sound test in the service menu, but
it presents a curated list of sounds, with
numbers that do not match the sound driver IDs.
It also automatically plays a song when it's
selected, and plays sound 0 when you enter the
sound test; this alone makes it not ideal for
ripping without hacking. I instead looked into
the sound driver to see which sound IDs are
valid, then rigged the sound test to have
sound 0 play each successive song with the MAME
debugger command
    mainpcb:maincpu.mb@1F01A = xx
where xx is the hexadecimal code without
prefix.

Dynamite Guy (sound driver ID $81) has a bunch
of tracks with drifting loops. This is most
notable in the bassline, which also happens to
be the lead instrument, and is obvious after
the second iteration. However, it's still
barely perceptible in that second iteration, so
this VGM may sound somewhat off if you are used
to hearing the song that way. This VGM loops
just one iteration; the drum track loop seems
to work fine as a loop point without
prematurely cutting off any notes.

The loop on Stranger (sound driver ID $83) is
almost certainly wrong, or at the very least,
imperfect. The problem here is that the drums
and the rest of the song loop differently, with
the drums having a longer and more chaotic
pattern. By my calculations based on two long
rips, a correct loop may require a VGM that is
likely 8-9 hours long. The shorter of the two
rips, however, claims to have a loop that
vgmlpfind marks with a ! that the longer rip
doesn't have, and also converts via libvgm
vgm2wav into a wav file that slowly diverges
from the unlooped version. This is the version
chosen here. Analysis of the original sound
data may be required to refine this rip.

Strangely, Take It Easy!! has two sound driver
IDs, $85 and $8F; only the former is used (and
is the rip included here). Both IDs point to
the same code and data.

The loop on All or Nothing (sound driver ID
$87) is definitely wrong. One of the
accompaniment tracks (on FM channels 1 and 2,
counting from 0) appears to have been sequenced
with a number of errors and incorrect attempts
at repairing those errors, and as a result it
loops a measure too early. By my calculations,
a properly looping version would last about 2-3
hours, so I just cut it off after one iteration
here. This is what the OST also does.

The loop on Good Feeling (sound driver ID $88)
seems like it includes two iterations, but
if you listen carefully the accompaniment
switches between two different patterns on
every other pass through the main melody, so
this is correct.

Yes, Advertise (sound driver ID $8B) does
indeed end abruptly without looping.

Thanks to ctr for help with the OST and Valley
Bell for help with the tools.

— andlabs

Source: VGMRips