Frequently Asked Questions

Installing, updating and using 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 those subdirectories. 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.

Some of the files on your site don't play

  1. Make sure you have the latest version of both Hoot (many newly added games require the latest version to work at all), the set (they do get updated once in a while) and the ini enhancements
  2. If a set still doesn't seem to play on your Hoot setup, try to wait for a while after loading it. Some sets actually require quite a bit of time before you can listen to the tunes - for instance Grounseed takes about 5-10 seconds of preparing.
  3. Some MIDI sets won't work unless you install special files. Read below on more info on that.
  4. If that doesn't help, feel free to contact me. It's possible that I may have botched something during the preparing/uploading process.

Hoot doesn't show Japanese characters

  1. This one will work only for Windows XP/2003 users. If anyone knows of another way, that works in Win9x/2k, share the knowledge.
  2. Install japanese font.
  3. Install AppLocale from: Microsoft's site
  4. (Optional) Install patched AppLocale exe. This gets rid of the annoying nag screen.
  5. Start hoot with this command (you can make a batchfile/shortcut):
    D:\WINDOWS\AppPatch\AppLoc.exe "F:\players\hoot\hoot.exe" "/L0411"
    Of course you have to change the paths to correspond with your setup.

Installing MT-32 emulation

  1. Get the mt32sound.dll and put it into the hoot directory.
  2. Get the MT-32 control roms (MT32_CONTROL.ROM and MT32 PCM.ROM) and put them into the hoot directory.
  3. If there are MT32A and MT32B files, you have to join them with MT32merge into MT32_CONTROL.ROM.
  4. Start Hoot. The first time it will play a song using MT-32 emulation, it will process for 10-20 seconds (caching the wavetable). After that, the playing's instantous.
  5. Some of the songs, especially Konami and Wolfteam ones will sound bad. Nothing to be done about it, except using a real MT-32 instead.

Installing Vermouth synthesizer

  1. Get the vermouth.dll and put it into the hoot directory.
  2. Get GUS patches. For example, you can use eawpats11_full_beos.zip. Extract it to some directory.
  3. Put the timidity.cfg into the hoot directory and edit the "dir" statement in timidity.cfg to point to your GUS patch directory.

Hack for Hoot to not play songs neverendingly

  1. Get Cheap and put it into the hoot directory.
  2. Run hoot, then when it's loaded execute 'hootclient.exe list 1.txt'. This will create a textfile which will store all the song data. You can freely edit this (would be a good idea to divide it gamewise). The first column corresponds to the playtime.
  3. Now run cheap.exe (hoot still running), fileselector will pop-up. Choose the playlist.
  4. You can change the default songtime in cheap.ini.

Help, suddenly Hoot only plays songs for one minute

  1. Well, that only happens with the arcade games as far as I know.
  2. Solution is simple - go to the Hoot's site, type in a valid mail adress (the second field is for confirming) and wait for the registration key.
  3. Then, paste the contents (something like:
    email=your_mail
    expire=20060722
    key=1111111111) into hoot.ini file, save it and the tunes should play now for as long as you like.
  4. The registration key is valid for three months, after that you'll have to repeat the whole process. Luckily it's free. :)

Best sound quality

  1. If you notice some slight differences between Hoot's output and the real hardware, fear not, it's fixable.
  2. Just set the sampling_rate option in hoot.ini to 55466 for YM2203 based systems (PC88/PC98) and 62400 for YM2151 based ones (X1/X68000).
  3. The difference is slight, but noticable in some cases - try 'Maiden of the Lake' from Yu-No for instance.
  4. If that doesn't solve the problem, please contact me, with more data, we'll see what can be done about it.

Playing SPC files in Hoot

  1. As you might have noticed, I don't have the SPC packs available for download here. Simple reason - they are large, and our mother site has them all already.
  2. Here's what you do, if you want to hear them in Hoot too. Step one: Download the RSN files.
  3. Step two: change the file extension to RAR, unpack them, and then pack the contents with ZIP (keeping the original archive filename).
  4. Now just put them into the other folder, if everything went fine, they should work. Happy listening!

Running Hoot using Wine (under x86 based Linux, Macintosh, other Unix systems)

  1. Everything you need to get started is a sufficiently recent version of Wine, cabextract, unzip as well as the Windows files mfc42.dll, msvcp60.dll, msxml3.dll and msxml3a.dll (you can easily find them in Windows installation and on the internet). You need to be familiar with the system's command line shell to be able to execute many of the commands correctly.
  2. Create a hoot folder at your preferred location and extract the application archive (using cabextract) and the ini enhancements archive (using unzip) into there.
  3. Put all the Windows files into the Wine's system32 folder (usually at ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32), then go to the Wine's inf folder (usually ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/inf) and execute wine rundll32 setupapi.dll,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 128 wine.inf.
  4. Now run winecfg, add msxml3 on the Libraries tab (so that the native version is used) and set up the correct audio driver you use on the Audio tab.
  5. For making hoot easier to execute you may also want to create a shell file with following content:
    #!/bin/bash
    cd /path_to_your_hoot_folder
    wine hoot
  6. If you want to send MIDI data to an external MIDI unit (like Roland MT-32) add an output_midi_device=x line to hoot.ini where x is anything higher than 0 (0 chooses the MIDI Mapper which is completely broken in Wine, the correct number for the MIDI out port varies between soundcards).