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There's clearly-unused bytes in Shadow Warriors from $FDC0-$FFBF. It tentatively feels to me like the least-invasive injection would be to shrink both the snare (512? bytes) and bd sample (256? bytes) by 128 bytes each and stuff them in the remaining free space. It might also be practical to resamp...

Thank you all for the answers, for the record I did not buy this, I received it as a gift because the previous holder didn't want it anymore... (maybe because it's a pirate copy) I just wanted to say this because I don't want to look like a complete jackass again. Sadly I can't check what's on this ...

I've recently got a Famicom cart of Strider from a friend, and when I took the PCB out I was puzzled because it looks nothing like the NES board. Can someone identify the "unnamed" chip for me on the right?

So... I wanted to save an extra 32 bytes by using 1-byte looped DPCM ramps instead of the 17-byte unlooped ones, but I got a weird behavior, where the amplitude changes in APU2 didn't happen fast enough or something... is there really something different going on when the loop flag is set? Also, sin...

Yeah I see the problems with this, and so I made a 16-bit LFSR to produce noise, whose bit-depth and volume are configurable via an AND of the low 8 bits of the LFSR with a variable. Then I filled the NMI with enough NOPs to get a fully used up VBlank time, and there really was no audible effect on ...

No, because the idea occured to me, that not only arbitrary waves could be made, but a lot of things where the instant level changes happen in IRQ and the rest is automatic. That way you can minimize the CPU usage because it's the automatic playback in-between IRQs, but at some point with complex wa...

Yeah I figured NMIs would be a no-no but also the OAM DMA... which I guess would still be a problem even if you choose lower pitches + increase the sample length (but it also detunes you to a B scale) I threw these together in a couple minutes, and I was too lazy to add a controller reading routine ...

I've been listening to a lot of POKEY music and a lot of songs manipulate the channel volume at different rates to produce a 4-bit wavetable channel. And I'm curious, is it possible to do something like this with the NES? Just a single channel with <=64 samples per wavetable. (the bit depth could ei...

Well, if you want to get pedantic about it, no, none of those need to be always banked-in. They could all go in RAM, for example. :P Yeah I thought that would enable a huge amount of usable DPCM samples for games, it just needs extra ram and a mapper capable of switching in the $C000-$FFFF range. I...

So it's been a while, and things are going pretty well, I'm slowly getting my game loop system in order, but the thing is, I'm already quite "scared" of running out of resources, especially that whenever I have routines that at some point, do bankswitching (to call a sound effect or someth...

I think 3 is the easiest because the castle is a joke... The stages are short, they give you tons of E-tanks, and not even the Yellow Devil is threatening because the pieces move slower than they did in MM1, and you also have a sliding ability so you only need to jump when a piece comes at you at th...

So I've been thinking, and for a cutscene I will probably want to show a scrolling background (just with the two nametables repeating over and over again) and show text at the same time, so I'd have to split the screen with a sprite 0 hit. But when do I need to do that? I read that accessing $2000 d...

BossSQ1_00_Inst: .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 BossSQ1_00_Len_Lo: .db $06,$07,$06,$07 .db...

By the way, if you are struggling with DPCM samples and the space loss they cause in the fixed bank, you can also try playing your code as a sound! Most of the time it's just random garbage (but you can still use it as a looped wind sound so your noise channel is free to do something else) but I fou...

You're on the right track but by having looked at your plans, I can't help advising you to find some other way of representing your note effects because this produces TONS of redundant data, for example you are storing the current instrument for every single note. Instead, you should keep a variable...