Colin Sandquist wrote: Wed Jul 24, 2024 11:24 pmMaybe I should ditch the idea of putting it onto the SNES because of the graphics problem alone?
Because it would take up too much space. Each game I know carries about 700 MB of Data I think - so It can get on a Windows CD -
But no way on a SNES Game? I don't know how to compress the graphics to give it that very old school look.
[...]
Anyways, thanks for the help everyone. I will note this entire help board and do further investigations, but because of the SNES
limitations, may be a dead end. Then there is the game size and graphics problems alone. As for the music, I do my own music
but would have to also compress the music into a bit format. Could also ruin the music. Yeah - just a lot of problems.
SNES games are typically far more compact, memory-wise, than PC games. PC games tend to be full of unnecessary bloat. I suspect a 700 MB RPG Maker game could easily turn out to be small enough in terms of actual effective content to fit on a 2 to 4 MB SNES cartridge, at least if the audio were redone. The graphical assets are probably in unnecessarily data-heavy formats and outright waste a lot of space, and music and sound effects can get really big really fast if you don't have system limitations to restrain you and force you to get creative.
Or if you can't pitch samples up and down like the SNES can, and end up needing a dozen variations of the exact same waveform at different speeds, or if you're doing a sound effect the SNES could generate live but RPG Maker forces you to render and store as a 48 kHz MP3... This applies to graphics as well; if you need a bunch of different colours of the same thing, they all have to be separate graphics because they aren't palettized, whereas on SNES you'd just change 30 bytes of CGRAM and Bob's your uncle.
(Anyone know if that 700 MB is likely to include unused assets? I haven't used RPG Maker, so I don't know how efficiently (or otherwise, if at all) it might be trimmed when compiling.)
The big issue here is that we have no idea what the games you're considering porting are like. It's difficult to advise you in a vacuum.
That said, this kind of port is really not an easy task. If you don't want to try it yourself, and you can't reach an agreement with somebody who knows what he's doing (this would almost certainly be a paid job; nobody here is going to donate that much work for free unless they're HUGE fans of your games, and maybe not even then), it's probably not going to happen.
...
As noted above, the MSU1 allows you to use uncompressed Red Book audio, with looping and resume, for music. It also allows up to 4 GB of data in addition to the audio, though that may be less important for the reasons I and Pokun have noted. But using MSU1 would require either an emulator-or-FXPak-only approach, or a hardware implementation of the MSU1, whether in-cartridge or as a 32X-style passthrough. A hardware implementation of the MSU1 would be cool, but it's a whole other project on top of the one you're contemplating.
(There isn't a ton of FMV or something in these games, is there? The MSU1 might be the only way to handle something like that...)
There are free open-source community solutions for making sequenced SNES music, including at least three simple game audio solutions (SNESMOD, an older suite that I think is used by PVSnesLib, Shiru's SNESGSS, which has been around for a few years, and UnDisbeliever's Terrific Audio Driver, which is fairly new and explicitly compatible with PVSnesLib). And since the S-DSP is mostly a sample-based synthesizer, with an optional noise generator and a few nice effects like an FIR-filtered echo and channel-to-channel pitch modulation, it shouldn't be all that difficult for a musician to figure out.
Fun fact: the S-DSP doesn't have a built-in pan law, so you have to set channel L and R volumes separately to pan (there's a separate gain control, so you don't have to do this to fade). But since those volume values are signed (meaning they can be negative, meaning phase flip), it's pretty trivial to output sequenced music and/or sound effects in Dolby Surround...
Pokun wrote: Wed Jul 17, 2024 8:44 amand there is also the Ruby interpreter that I doubt is going to be ported to SNES and run at the same speed as on an IBM PC from 2004 or later. If the game you want to port doesn't use any Ruby scripts it might not be a problem though.
I don't know why Ruby is an issue when the engine is hypothetically being redone from scratch on SNES. Just write a dedicated lightweight bytecode scripting language like every other RPG on the SNES, and translate the Ruby scripts into that.
What does Ruby even do in this context?
