Can we "Snooze" the 2a03?

[FloResolution]

I was thinking about SnoozeTracker, and how you could have various waveforms on it, it's kinda like an in between form of SID 6581 and the Yamaha AY chip. Makes for some great music. I've seen people say you can only really run it by itself on real hardware bc it takes up mad space. Also I think I've seen oscilloscopes of it playing sampled audio on multiple channels

Wondering if the NES could do the same. I know you can make saw waves by overclocking, but there are far less notes at your disposal. I know the 2 Pulse channels, Triangle (by the high pitch intervals) and Noise channels can produce saw waves by its volume. I think the noise could also do a square messing around with the volume envelope.

Also I've seen projects where people are making wavetables with the DPCM channel, as well as another for clearer sample quality. But I'm just curious. btw I don't know how the 6502 works, just to be clear too, I just like trackers

[lidnariq]

To answer the exact question you asked, unlike both the AY and the SN76489, the NES doesn't provide the ability to leave a channel just at DC "on" - you can't "snooze" the hardware oscillators.

You still can bit-bang volume control on the NES, like almost every chip.

If I had to guess why I haven't heard of anyone doing this, it's that the NES already provides a DAC, and that gets you most of what one gets from this technique, other than the PWM sound.

(P.S. the program maxYMiser provides the same controls on the AY, plus all the bonus built-in harmonic mixing of the AY)

[Individualised]

IIRC there is a driver for getting sawtooth and other waveforms that doesn't take up so much CPU time that uses DPCM.

[FloResolution]

Oh alright.

I just thought about it because, I really wanted to hear Saw waves and PWM on the NES. Hell, even Pulse, Triangle, Noise, and DPCM on multiple channels would be cool. And being able to have more pitch options would be nice too. But I think you'd need to change the clocking on the fly to do that, and I'm not an NES to know that. Furnace Tracker goes up to 1000 hz which is great, but again idk how the 6502 operates, that well.

[FloResolution]

IIRC there is a driver for getting sawtooth and other waveforms that doesn't take up so much CPU time that uses DPCM.

I heard about that, could be very cool, has potential. Isn't it still a wip tho?

[lidnariq]

Z-saw has already been used publicly; it seems to close-enough-to-ready-to-use: https://github.com/zeta0134/z-saw/

[Dwedit]

If you don't mind 100% CPU usage, there's also SuperNSF for playing basically MOD files.