::|CONTENTS
- Setting up hoot
- 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 the "roms" subdirectory. 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
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 - Open Hoot, press Ctrl+R
6 - 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).
