Notes:Toy Story (Genesis)
This page contains notes for the game Toy Story (Genesis).
The Title And Staff Roll Themes Are Literally Amiga MODs
No, that is not hyperbole.
| In-Game Playback | Extracted .MOD |
|---|---|
While most songs in Toy Story utilise the GEMS sound driver for FM and PSG sequences, the title and staff roll themes, arrangements of Strange Things and You've Got A Friend In Me from the film's soundtrack respectively, curiously use a custom sample-based sound player programmed by Jon Burton. This sound player can best be described as magic, as it plays four sounds at once and pipes it through the YM2612's singular DAC for audio playback. The format used is .MOD, a sound file normally reserved for the Commodore Amiga. This tightly-packed 91 kilobyte file titled toy3 can be found in the ROM starting in 0x299CE and ending at 0x408F9 in the American ROM, or 0x2A2B8 - 0x411E3 in the European ROM. The only differences between the two are Fxx changes to accommodate for regional speed differences.
Theoretically, you could just drop in any MOD file that's under 91 kilobytes, but the player is overspecialised for the game's MOD, and many MOD features are missing.
Due to the monstrous amount of CPU write spam involved, the songs run at 11khz and bog down the CPU significantly, leaving little room for gameplay, and are restricted to static screens. Toy Story is the only Genesis game to use MOD files for audio playback, as other games that softmix samples use vastly different methods and data formats (Ristar, Skitchin', and Mega Turrican mix samples, but differ in their method).
Jon Burton has since published an in-depth review of the MOD engine over at GameHut, which you can see here.
