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::|CONTENTS

1. Setting up hoot
2. Playing your own PMD files in hoot

The Hoot Player

is a sound hardware emulator developed by the japanese DMP SOFT. It supports a wide variety of soundchips, but it's very strict with the formats, it's very unlikely that you'll find other formats to play on it aside from Japanese Computers and SPC.

Setting up hoot

---

1 - Get the lastest version of Hoot

and extract it to some directory (it will be referred as hoot directory from now on).
2 - Get the Drum samples for OPNA sets

and extract it into the hoot directory.
3 - Get the lastest ini enhancements

as linked from the menu on the left. Extract it into the hoot directory and agree whenever it asks about overwriting exiting files. Once new ini enhancements are available you can repeat this.
4 - After extracting the ini enhancements there will be new but empty subdirectories in the hoot directory. Put the sets downloaded from the site

into those subdirectories. They should be packed, don't extract the sets themselves.
5 - Now start hoot.exe, using the Enter, Esc and arrow keys you can browse your collection. Enter on a song will play that song, P stops it, 0 restarts it, the keys 1-8 and Q-I can be used to mute the respective single channels, O to mute all and 9 to unmute all channels.

Playing your own PMD files in hoot

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Hoot has the most accurate sound emulation for the PC-x801 chips (it uses both MAME

's sound drivers and fmgen

for sound generation but hoot is very strict with its formats so you can't just simply drag'n drop your .M and .M2 files to play it, since it also needs to load the drivers. So you could only play it by replacing another song in a PC-98 soundtrack that uses PMD.

But MovieMovies1 has created a custom file so you can do it without sacrificing a soundtrack.

1 - Download pmd_hoot.zip

;
2 - Add the line "<list>xml/mcpmd.xml</list>" into the list of xml files in hoot.xml, found in the main directory (on the M section, since it loads in alphabetical order);
3 - Extract mcpmd.xml into hoot's xml folder;
4 - Extract mcpmd.zip into hoot's pc98 folder.
5 - Then just replace the .M and .M2 files with the ones you want to play.

Keep in mind that .M files will only play in the OPN (YM2203) mode and .M2 files will only play in the OPNA (YM2608).