Nintendo DS/DSi NCSF Gamerip Releases

Saturday, September 14, 2024

Last Updated: Friday, October 4, 2024

First, some notes:

All variant builds of the NCSF plugin library have varying issues. The following so far:

Certain NCSF variant plugin builds have various volume shift issues due to an array shift change that tends to cause subtle rare clipping in certain conditions (this is primarily noticeable with headphones, but not speakers as much), of which Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 will expose: recent Winamp plugin builds up to July 2020 and SSEQPlayer-based players do not exhibit the array shift issue; recent Winamp plugin builds starting from May 2022 have mild to moderate clipping issues due to the array shift issue. Most other NCSF gamerips are fine... even Pokémon Black and White, strangely enough. Self-created issue here, now solved. - Fixed in v0.2 of my Winamp plugin fork and WACUP Preview v1.99.22.20200/v1.99.22.20202 by reverting to original FSS behavior.
Certain older NCSF plugin builds cannot parse Unicode characters in file paths properly, though Unicode characters in file names are fine. Fixed in later Winamp plugin builds during a code refactor.
The December 9, 2014 NCSF Winamp plugin build listed on the original NCSF website page has a subtle modulation problem, and in even rarer cases, some slight muffling in the entire track, of which Pokémon Black and White and Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 will expose, for example. (These issues are also carried out to early versions of SSEQPlayer/foo_input_ncsf.) This was fixed in more recent Winamp builds. This was also fixed in later versions of the SSEQPlayer plugin.
The December 9, 2014 NCSF Winamp plugin build listed on the original NCSF website page has a PSG bug that makes such notes sound like high-pitched beeps, of which Sonic Rush will expose. This is fixed in later builds, but they have other issues.
The May 15, 2022 NCSF Winamp plugin build listed in Issue 3 on the original Github page plays certain songs with... very unintended pitch bend effects in Pokémon Black and White and Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. This is not present in the July 9, 2020 build. Self-created issue here, partially resolved at the time. - Fixed in v0.1 of my Winamp plugin fork and WACUP Preview v1.99.19.19884.
The May 15, 2022 NCSF Winamp plugin build listed in Issue 3 on the original Github page cannot parse certain NCSF rips at all due to an out-of-bounds bug caused by the change of FileID from uint16_t to uint32_t. Pokémon Ranger is affected by this, for example. This is not present in the July 9, 2020 build. Fixed in v0.1 of my plugin fork and WACUP Preview v1.99.19.19884.
Winamp plugin builds starting from v1.4 can play a few notes with slight popping on one song so far. This predates the PLAYER Record bug. This is also not present in SSEQPlayer. Self-created issue here.
Winamp plugin builds starting from v1.11 can play a few notes with slight popping on a few songs from different NCSF albums so far caused by an oversight in the PLAYER Record implementation. (Not that you can tell with the other issues in some cases.) While not as prevalent in earlier builds, later builds will get this more often due to a tempo fix introduced in 2021. This was not present in v1.10.3 and earlier. This is also not present in SSEQPlayer, where the PLAYER Record implementation is entirely absent. Self-created issue here, now solved. - Fixed in v0.3 of my Winamp plugin fork.
The SSEQPlayer library (the original foo_input_ncsf variant so far) in its current state cannot play certain tracks in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. (There could be other albums; very few NCSFs have ever been ripped, anyway.) I have not figured out why; it's clearly not a Unicode character parsing issue. There is a 64-bit version of foo_input_ncsf now, though I wouldn't be surprised if it has the same flaw despite the plugin fixes... because it uses the same SSEQPlayer library code.