Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Audio Overload 2.0b6 release

I probably won't be writing any more expansion sound chip emulators. As I remember, MMC5 and VRC7 are rarely used. I was going to support FDS a while back but couldn't find reliable documentation. Having never even heard the thing, I didn't go further.

I care most about exact emulation; if I can't get very close I won't bother. N106 and VRC6 were simple enough that I implemented them based on documentation alone. GBS sound is still somewhat problematic because I don't have a Game Boy development cartridge for testing the sound hardware. Documentation always falls short in some way and it's not fun going in circles trying to figure out what's supposed to happen in ill-defined cases.

It might be possible to run other FDS, MMC5, and VRC7 emulators in parallel. The simplest solution of course is to include an alternate NSF engine that supports everything, and use it when the expansion sound bits in the NSF header have any bits other than 0x11 set.

As an alternate NSF sound engine with support for (I think) all the expansion sound chips, I'd recommend Disch\'s NotSoFatso , or the band-limited rewrite in his experimental Schpune. I think they're both under the GNU GPL license (I'm e-mailing the author about alternate licensing). I'd even volunteer to separate the NSF playing code from NotSoFatso or Schpune into a more independent player library.

I'm probably wrong, but I thought the VRCVII was just an OPLL with additional h/w for memory mapping-- could MAME's YM2413 core be fudged in or something? Not a huge deal, since only one commercial game uses it, but it seems to be somewhat popular with doujin NSFs.

No idea, but if that's the case I could easily hack in Jarek's like you say.

UPDATE: Yeah, Charles Mac Donald says it's a YM2413, and that's good enough for me :-)

What about support for the NSFe format? It's just an extension to NSF, but if you try to play an NSFe in AO it just shows gibberish in the song titles and doesn't make any sound.

http://disch.zophar.net/nsfe.php

It's rather more than "just an extension". That said, support would be nice. blargg, you up for it?

OK, I just rewrote the my player's NSFE code as a standalone module and tested it a bit. It allows use of the following NSFE fields (others can be easily added if necessary):

Game, author, copyright, person who ripped music, names of individual tracks, lengths of individual tracks, and an optional playlist. In most NSFEs the playlist contains the music tracks in the order they occur while playing the game, leaving out the sound effects and short music sequences.

One small issue that's bugging me is that on OS X, the "Export to WAV" dialog box only allows filenames up to 31 characters long. Is there any intention on allowing longer file names in the future?

I'll resolve that at some stage, though I can't say that is a priority for me.

Richard in Venice

Is there any place to download old builds of AO? There are some strange things happening with some of my SPCs, and I think the previous version I had played them fine... but I want to check.

AFAIK there's no archive. Sorry.