After seeing something DWedit said on this board, I made some research and I found a way to find and modify the settings of GBA games that uses the standard ("sappy") sound driver. In theory, by increasing the sampling rate, the games should sound better. However, I have issues with it.
See chapter 3 here
The main issues are this :
1) Some games just ignores if you change the values and this has absolutely no effect (ex : Fire Emblem games)
2) Some games let you change the values, but will glitch. (ex : Golden sun, which apparently let you change the sampling rate but "force" the frequency of the DMA, which result in terrible sound if you change the rate)
3) Some games eventually let you change the value, but the percussion instruments and sound effects, which are "non-resampled" instruments (see in my doc) will also play faster and won't sound good.
I know those problems won't go away, but I'd like to see GSF ripped with forced high-quality parameters. I've been able for example to make a GSF rip of Castlevania - Aria of Sorrow and force the game to have 12 channels and sampling rate of 44 kHz, and it does sound a bit better than the original. However, I've had to change manually all percussion instrument from mode 8 to mode 0 (so they are down-sampled), and because most of the time all instruments are down-sampled (because the engineers designed it game for 13 kHz) it doens't sound that much better.
I'd like the help of someone who knowns a lot about ARM and the GBA to be able to make high quality GSFs.
See chapter 3 here
The main issues are this :
1) Some games just ignores if you change the values and this has absolutely no effect (ex : Fire Emblem games)
2) Some games let you change the values, but will glitch. (ex : Golden sun, which apparently let you change the sampling rate but "force" the frequency of the DMA, which result in terrible sound if you change the rate)
3) Some games eventually let you change the value, but the percussion instruments and sound effects, which are "non-resampled" instruments (see in my doc) will also play faster and won't sound good.
I know those problems won't go away, but I'd like to see GSF ripped with forced high-quality parameters. I've been able for example to make a GSF rip of Castlevania - Aria of Sorrow and force the game to have 12 channels and sampling rate of 44 kHz, and it does sound a bit better than the original. However, I've had to change manually all percussion instrument from mode 8 to mode 0 (so they are down-sampled), and because most of the time all instruments are down-sampled (because the engineers designed it game for 13 kHz) it doens't sound that much better.
I'd like the help of someone who knowns a lot about ARM and the GBA to be able to make high quality GSFs.