unnamed-snes-game

[KungFuFurby]

Yes... I had actually opened the first pull request for my music contributions on March 18th (so I had already jumped the gun on that one). The soundtrack itself evolved over time as the sound driver went from six channels to eight channels, in addition to feedback-related adjustments regarding volume balancing between music and SFX, so I've been keeping the soundtrack up to date as the sound driver evolves.

[SNES AYE]

Hey, UnDisbeliever, I'm not quite sure I understand what a sound driver is here. So, can I just ask, does this mean you've developed a tool that other people can use to create music for SNES? And if so, is this something new that allows them to do things with the SNES audio that they couldn't with other tools or maybe just get a better sound quality than other older tools, or is it simply an alternative option they can use if maybe there's something they prefer about the way you've designed this particular tool or something like that?

[UnDisbeliever]

Hey, UnDisbeliever, I'm not quite sure I understand what a sound driver is here. So, can I just ask, does this mean you've developed a tool that other people can use to create music for SNES? And if so, is this something new that allows them to do things with the SNES audio that they couldn't with other tools or maybe just get a better sound quality than other older tools, or is it simply an alternative option they can use if maybe there's something they prefer about the way you've designed this particular tool or something like that?

An audio-driver (also known as an audio-engine) is the code that runs on the spc700 processor. It is responsible for setting the S-DSP registers and communicating with the 65816 CPU to play music and sound effects.

I wrote the Terrific Audio Driver because I was dissatisfied with how the other open-source game-ready audio-drivers (snesmod, snesgss and qspc) handled sound effects. I wanted an audio driver that could hold ~100 sequenced sound effects. TAD was written to be sound-effect first, to the point where I implemented sound effects before my audio-driver could play music and before the the audio-compiler could parse MML (the music format I chose).

After about 6 months, I was happy with my audio-driver. It did everything I wanted and was at a point where I could make music and sound effects with. But I'm horrible at making music. So I made the decision to port the tooling to rust, build a GUI and make the driver easier for other people to use. This includes the decision to maintain the project and add requested features to the driver/GUI (provided they are not too outrageous).

The Terrific Audio Driver is an alternative option snesdevers can use in their games with the following features:

• Actively developed.
• The spc700 code is zlib licensed.
• Channel ducking. 8 Music channels and 2 sound effect channels.
• Songs written in a pmdmml inspired MML format.
• Sequenced sound effects, written in either bytecode assembly or MML.
• Configurable sound effect dropout behaviour:
  • High-priority sfx that will override the currently playing sfx. Intended for important sfx like player-hurt-low-health.
  • Interruptible sfx.
  • Uninterruptible sfx. Useful for vocal samples or item collected ditties.
  • One channel sfx that will play on a maximum 1 SFX channel. Intended for rapidly played sfx (ie, collect-coin) to prevent it from occupying both sfx channels.
  • Low-priority sfx that will not play if both sfx channels are occupied. Intended for background sfx like water droplets.
  See the sound-effect documentation for more details.
• Echo, portamento and vibrato support.
• An asynchronous API for ca65 and PvSnesLib that supports loading audio data over multiple frames. Useful for loading audio data in the middle of a level transition or fade-in.
• A GUI that:
  • Runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux
  • Plays MML songs at the cursor position or line start
  • Plays songs and sound effects at the same time (to assist in volume balancing sound effects and music)

[SNES AYE]

OK. Thank you for all the information there. That helps clarify a lot of things. Thanks again.