Same ol’, same ol’

This time ripping the sounds from the SPC files wasn’t new to me, and I won’t go into all the details like last time (if you’re interested, just visit the previous posting).

The New Shit

What was different, however, were the samples present in the files: In F-Zero sound files, basically every sample was loaded with every song, whether used or not. In F-Zero’s case this wasn’t a major problem since the samples were really small, but with Street Fighter 2 this habit began to change a bit: The majority of samples was present in all SPC-files as well, but in the sample-registers 46 and 47, and occasionally 45, were different samples in different arenas, like wood-block and shamisen in the E. Honda’s bathhouse; or sitar in Dhalsim’s temple. In practice this meant listening closely to each song and surveying the sample-number for new samples in familiar places in the register.

Shoryou-! …

Additionally I could also find out which fighters had been in the stage when the SPC file had been dumped from the game, because the sound-samples of the fighters were in them as well — heavily chopped up and four times the speed than they were played in the game; probably another means to save memory. For example, Ryu’s “Hadouken!” cry consists of two separate samples, “Hadou!” and “Ken!”, so that the latter can also be used after the “Shoryou!”-sample for the Shoryouken-move. Seems like it really pays off having played (and listened) to this game 18 years ago or so.

Soundfonting

I did just like I did a few days back, converting the samples to 44.1 kHz, recreating the loops and ASDR-envelopes and putting the new instruments in a soundbank with the Viena soundfont editor.

But the most annoying part in Viena is to construct a GM-compatible drumset, where all the right drum samples are in the right pitch mapped onto the right key. The thing is, that there’s a lot of recycling going on in the SNES-tunes and this over-complicates things in the editor. So for example for the toms you have to add the same sample like six times to the “Drums”-instrument. And in Viena such tasks become a tedious click-orgy.

Progression

Compared to F-Zero there are a lot more real-world instrument samples to find, especially for the drums. The Street Fighter 2 percussion includes:

• A snare drum,
• finally a decent bass (kick) drum,
• a tom-tom,
• a crash cymbal, although with an audible looping point,
• a ride cymbal, used as hi-hats solely in the Sagat stage.
• claves,
• a bongo (used in Blanka’s stage)
• a synth clapping sound for Zangief’s stage (the other analog-sounding drums are just pitched snare and bass drum samples)
• a wood-block sound, also in Honda’s stage.

Yet still: FM synthesized samples are plenty also with this score, but slowly there was a trend emerging of refraining from familiar FM-syth-sounds and towards more realistic, albeit memory-intense, real-instrument samples. It is 1992 we’re talking about, after all.

All things considered, the more samples make the drums much more versatile than those from F-Zero, although I just adore that hearty snare drum there.

Fill ‘em up

Another major difference to the F-Zero is the sheer density in sound-layers. Nintendo’s racing title just used four of the Super Nintendo’s eight simultaneous playback-channels solely for music playback, Street Fighter 2 seven, sometimes all eight! But I guess that’s okay, since the only other sound-samples are punches, groans and special-move shouts and if there’s a very subtle channel pausing for the second Ryu gets punched in the face or Chun-Li yells “Spinning Bird Kick!” so be it.

And the channels are packed! There hardly is any silence in either of them when the music is busy. Even solo-ing only three channels sound like four or five: Capcom’s sound team really packed the tracks with so much stuff that it’s almost a bit too much, in my opinion…

Some Music, eh?

But enough with the the chewing of technical facts and limitations, let’s hear some music! And instead of trying to recreate the tracks we all know by heart, I played a bit with my SNES sound-fonts so far and came up with two new original songs in the style of real old-school SNES music.

This one is my F-Zero tribute, take a listen:

Black Gulch (F-Zero Tribute) by sephcarissa

And the track below is the music to my fictitious stage, also a humble attempt at trying to catch the flair of Street Fighter 2′s score.

Seph’s Stage (Street Fighter 2 Tribute) by sephcarissa

Donwload and Donation

And there are a few of you who are just here for getting their hands on my soundfont, so I thought I give it away for a donation. Have fun! And thanks for listening and reading, y’all!

	Click the Image to download my SNES Street Fighter 2 Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

PS: If you love the meticulously hand-pixeled arenas as much as I do, you might wanna visit this site!

First of all I started a couple of months back with a WordPress theme titled “Pretty Spots” and spent endless hours (okay, with endless I mean 50 or so) tailoring it to my needs, because I wanted some features it was missing.

Coding

Like a sliding-door approach for various elements I wanted to have shadows, transparency and round edges. Yes, in terms of CSS this truly was hardcore, there are plenty of approaches on the web explaining how to pull it off when you have an opaque background, but if you haven’t noticed already: The background image is slightly visible behind this text-block. I’m all about transparency. I had to hack in a number of new div-boxes in the theme’s PHP, add some CSS classes and objects to get this to work, and I learned a lot too and subsequently the style.css almost doubled in size. Oh, and the background is also switching randomly. Currently I have a handful of backgrounds ready but as soon as I find more time, there are more to come.

Fonts

Next thing you probably noticed are the fonts. They are not the usual web-safe fonts and yet they are quite like it. I got them from the Google Web Font Directory and provided your internet connection isn’t very sucky, you should have them ready almost instantly.

Speed

Yes, that’s a big downside, since I laid my focus on presentation so there’s quite a heavy load of huge background images, web-fonts and other stuff that needs to load. But once everything is in the cache you’re able to cruise my blog swiftly and with comfort.

Compatibility

The original theme boasts being XHTML Transitional valid, but with all my widgets and plug-ins, PHP and CSS hacks I highly doubt that it sill is. On the other hand: This site is now 100% compatible with Firefox 3.5+ (also the Firefox 4 Beta and will almost certainly work with the release of FF4). This means that finally you have more than black text on a black background in your Opera browser.

Eye Candy

Yes, this was the most fun part. I tweaked a lot of styles like the following:

Further I also have another environment,

	And last but definitely not least have the donation-buttons finally got their more slick makeover and invite you more to click than ever before. In case you missed the Flattr or Kachingle buttons.

Happy new year again, and please comment here what you like and what you don’t like. Thanks!

I don’t now what’s all about this Zodiac thing but although Arthur Leigh Allen is long dead now it is still fascinating how everything floating around the Zodiac case creates a vortex of mania that sucks up all the people getting involved with it.

San Francisco Chronicle Author Paul Avery who was writing about the case became an alcoholic, Inspector David Toschi who spent about a decade on the frustrating case got bleeding ulcers. Cartoonist and writer Robert Graysmith poured all his soul into his two books he was writing from the early 1970′s until 2003 about the Zodiac, rather than into his family and hence wrecked two marriages.

And me? I’ve read Graysmith’s books during the summer, still haven’t quite finished on Zodiac Unmasked. I have always been insomniac but the last few days I was haunted by the abnormal characters of Zodiac’s handwriting that wanted me to be assembled in a font. I couldn’t escape, I had to finish it in order to regain some inner peace. I’ve even paid for hi-res scans of most of the Zodiac letters as a reference because I had to learn Zodiac’s handwriting and “synthesize” some characters myself. I hope that you don’t notice the ones I faked… but on the other hand: Emulating the handwriting of an insane mass murderer is kinda disturbing. I don’t dare writing about the nightmares I had from reading all the nasty things in the letters! Anyway if you like the font, a little donation would be appreciated.

The Font

Click here for a the complete character map and enjoy the ligatures!

All English characters plus numbers are part of the font, as well as the most common punctuation characters and some special characters.

The font is OpenType and can be used on both Macintosh and Windows ¹ based operating systems. Actually I strongly recommend using the font in an environment that supports OpenType such as Adobe InDesign or Adobe Illustrator rather than Word or some crap like that.

The font has loads of ligatures for nearly all the double consonants and numbers, small words and features context sensitive character substitution under the hood so that it looks more like natural handwriting than like repeating glyphs all over. If you don’t really understand what I was raving about: Don’t worry: Just write and watch how the glyphs in your text flip for best results — as long as OpenType features are activated. I just love scripting fonts!

For the Zodiac logo type (+).

An Example

Or click the thumbnail icon to this post on the top of the page for a comparison.

Donation & Download

The font is donation ware. So if you want to say a little “thanks” by donating money that would be really nice. Thank in advance!

	Click the Image to download the Zodiac OpenType Font

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Austria License.

The Font

First, please see the character chart of the available characters in this font. More than the last time.

All cyan marked characters are hand drawn by me because I couldn’t find a good representation of it in any of the Zodiac’s letters. So I had to draw them in his style from what I knew. I just hope that this won’t bother Bob Graysmith ¹. I did study all of Zodiac’s letters and ways of writing similar glyphs so I hope they blend in well with the rest of the font.

When dealing with scripts and handwritings in terms of font creation there are some things you want to avoid as a font designer such as repeating characters in double consonants, that’s why I added some self-made ligatures for the following cases:

• Because Zodiac started many of his letters by “This is the Zodiac speaking” the Th is very important. And it is a ligature. Also in my font
• ee, ff, ll, mm, nn, oo, oo, rr, ss, tt and zz but also // look silly when they consist of two exact glyphs, that’s why I added variations.
• Further there are ligatures for ra and af, just stumbled across them.
• Two common words are also a single glyph: of and is.
• You might want use the font for printing also email addresses or links, that’s why I’ve added an @, // and http as single glyphs for a better impression
• Type (+) for the Zodiac logo.

That’s why I chose OpenType rather than TrueType in the first place.

An Example

Or click the thumbnail icon to this post on the top of the page for a comparison.

Donation & Download

The font is donation ware. So if you want to say a little “thanks” by donating money that would be really nice. Thank in advance!

	Click the Image to download the Zanity OpenType Font

Zipher TrueType font

It wasn’t as easy as anticipated but still I managed to transport Zodiac’s thorough way of writing into the font which has all symbols used by Zodiac in his letter to Toschi on November 8, 1969. If you click the image you’ll see the mapping of the keys which is optimized for English/American keyboard layouts.

The very generous and very meticulous Mr. Richard Smith informed me of a missing character: The P with the filled counter in row 5, column 14 as well as in row 12, column 15 I mistook for a badly reproduced generic P when making the font and thus omitting it. It’s now mapped to the semicolon (;) so you won’t have to look very far away from your P key on your keyboard. In addition I cleaned all the outlines and adjusted some other details resulting in a better font with a smaller file-size.

 
See this chart for reference on the symbols.

Usage of the Zodiac Cipher Font

When typing lower case you mostly get the normal letters (except for the Q), when typing upper case you’ll get the alternative version of the letter, e.g. a backwards R or an upside down T. If you’re looking for the flag symbols use the numerals, also with caps for different symbols.

• You’ll get the small Zodiac logo by typing Z
• The big Zodiac logo which he used as signature is the &
• Type ! for the solid circle.
• The single time when Zodiac corrected one symbol (row 6, column 12) can also be reproduced hitting ]
• EDIT: The P with the filled counter can by reached via the semicolon.

Donation & Download

The font is donation ware. So if you want to say a little “thanks” by donating money that would be really nice. Thank in advance!

Patrons of the Promenade Blog so far:

• Mr. Richard Smith

	Click the Image to download the Zipher TrueType Font

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Austria License.