nesdev.org

The game itself is actually quite bad. The music is decent, but nothing memorable. What I remember mostly about Rockin' Kats is the bus that Nintendo's Swedish publisher drove around with in 1992. It had a bunch of NESs and TVs lined up on both sides of the aisle where you could play upcoming games for a while (then you had to get out and stand in line again). Among the games you could play (that I can remember) were Rockin' Kats, Batman : Return of the Joker and Darkman.

Shadowgate and Deja Vu do indeed use a lot of echoes. Both are pretty good too, though I might be biased because I played them so much at the time (to the point where one of my friends got banned from playing video games on school nights by his parents).

As far as echoes goes, I don't know if anyone has mentioned Robo Warrior, but it uses them a bit. Real good game too, and a good soundtrack.

..and of course Shadow of the Ninja (aka Blue Shadow). One of the best NES soundtracks ever imo.

mic_ wrote:What I remember mostly about Rockin' Kats is the bus that Nintendo's Swedish publisher drove around with in 1992. It had a bunch of NESs and TVs lined up on both sides of the aisle where you could play upcoming games for a while (then you had to get out and stand in line again).

Oh yeah the Nintendo Bus, it was pretty cool. When I was a kid my neighbor actually managed to get the bus to the village I come from, and on the evenings when it wasn't in use it was parked next to our house :)

I've stuck that demo up on the website;

http://dutycyclegenerator.com/#EchoDemo

I can safely say this is the most nutty single voice echo demo I've heard for the NES.

After a while it really starts sounding like two channels.

Awesome. After reading your post I think I have a good idea of how to implement it. How much RAM does it use to have all 3 channels have self-echo?

MetalSlime wrote:Awesome. After reading your post I think I have a good idea of how to implement it. How much RAM does it use to have all 3 channels have self-echo?

It depends on how big you want the delay.

RAM = delay x number of captured values per voice, per frame

I hadn't considered a circular buffer for that, makes perfect sense though. That is a cool idea, sounds good in the demo.

neilbaldwin wrote:I've stuck that demo up on the website;

http://dutycyclegenerator.com/#EchoDemo

I must say this is amazing. I wonder why nobody thourght of that buffer idea before. It's really cool ! Definitely a must for games with SRAM.

I've noticed that many games that Iku Mizutani composed for feature a similar echo effect for the square channels. His is a little simpler though, it only stores the note values(?) in the circular buffer (as opposed to amplitude and exact frequencies), which is $28 bytes long for each channel, so that's $50 bytes in total. It looks like he uses the exact same method on the Gameboy too.

For the C64 there's Hysteria, subsong 3 (Fred Gray 1987) which has a delay of sorts, using PWM. Supercan (Lars Hård 1986) uses delay around 02.20, but it's only one step so it's not that obvious.

I'm actually surprised I didn't find more (even with the help of those CSDb-forums), but it's a tricky thing to look for. And yeah, neither of these are very extensive use of delay anyway.

But it sure seems like C64 was first.

goto80 wrote:For the C64 there's Hysteria, subsong 3 (Fred Gray 1987) which has a delay of sorts, using PWM. Supercan (Lars Hård 1986) uses delay around 02.20, but it's only one step so it's not that obvious.

I'm actually surprised I didn't find more (even with the help of those CSDb-forums), but it's a tricky thing to look for. And yeah, neither of these are very extensive use of delay anyway.

But it sure seems like C64 was first.

Good stuff. Y'know I thought of Fred Gray and dug out of few of his tunes but I missed Hysteria.