hootrip

hootrip converts hoot emulator music sets into S98 v3 and VGM 1.71 / .vgz register-log files — headless, in batch, at full timing resolution.

hoot plays Japanese computer game music (PC-8801, PC-9801, X68000, MSX, …) by emulating the original hardware and running each game’s own sound driver. Its built-in logger only captures at 100 Hz, drops ADPCM, and has to be driven by hand through the GUI. hootrip rebuilds that pipeline as an open tool: it reads a set from the hoot XML catalogue, re-hosts the sound driver under its own emulation, and logs every chip register write.

hootrip produces only register logs. It contains no game ROM, sound data, or copyrighted music — you supply those from your own hoot archive.

What works today

• Catalogue — parses the full HootArchive (hoot.xml + 557 Shift_JIS gamelists, 8096 entries) with zero errors, including title-code expansion and set-folder resolution.
• Writers — S98 v3 and VGM 1.71 output with loop points, S98/GD3 tags, .vgz gzip, and automatic loop detection; independently verified against libvgm.
• PC-88 — a Z80 + OPN/OPNA re-host of hoot’s PATCH bootstrap; ~82% of sets rip cleanly.
• PC-98 DOS — a full MS-DOS re-host on the NP2 i286 core covering OPN and OPNA (PC-9801-86) sets across many driver families (PMD, cplay98, artdi, mbmusp, mdrv, MDR external-voice, MUSE/NMUSE, …).
• Archive rip — one command batch-rips the whole catalogue with process isolation per set, a parallel worker pool, and a resumable census manifest.

Documentation

• PC-98 driver families — how each sound-driver family delivers a song and how the harness reproduces it.
• Development notes — building, verification tooling, and the ground-truth methodology.

Source

The project lives on GitHub. It is a Rust workspace (hoot-xml, hoot-log, hoot-chips, hoot-cpu, hoot-machine, hootrip-cli); build with cargo build --release and run the hootrip binary against your archive.