nesdev.org

I just discovered why it never worked! I've been using the wrong slash key the whole time!

psycopathicteen wrote:Is there any Command Prompt for dummies?

Windows Command Prompt is a clone of MS-DOS Command Prompt. The very first Dummies book was DOS for Dummies in 1991.

I've been using the wrong slash key the whole time!

The DOS and Windows file system APIs accept both forward slash (/) and backslash (\) as folder separators, and a lot of programs will take both because they use the UNIX convention of starting options with a hyphen (-) (e.g. ls -l for list files in long format). But commands built into the command prompt (e.g. cd) and programs written by Microsoft (e.g. the Visual C++ compiler) assume / is only for options. This dates back to when MS-DOS 2.0 introduced folders. It used \ as the folder separator because / was already taken for command-line options, such as dir /s to list files in all subdirectories or dir /b to list in bare format with only filenames and not size or modification date. MS-DOS 2.0 tried to maintain compatibility with MS-DOS 1.0, which originally was a clone of Digital Research's CP/M, which also used / for command-line options.

cd works just fine with forward slashes in paths starting with XP (maybe even earlier).

mic_ wrote: cd \nes\projects
(or cd \n[press tab until you get to nes]\p[press tab until you get to projects])

Woah, that's news to me. I usually don't even put a space between cd\directory which stops that from working.

Another thing I'd suggest too, if you need to get the command prompt whenever you work on your project, create a shortcut to cmd and for the "start in" field put the directory there. My desktop has several cmd shortcuts like that to save me time for my active projects.

You can also put a batch file in the project's directory that opens up a new prompt with everything set everything up properly when you double-click it. This one I use for building 32X/Saturn stuff.. It opens up a new prompt located in the batch file's directory with the SH2 toolchain temporarily added to the path.

Set PATH=C:\PROGRA~1\KPITCU~1\GNUSHV~1\sh-elf\bin;C:\PROGRA~1\KPITCU~1\GNUSHV~1\OtherU~1;%PATH%
Set MAKE_MODE=unix

Cmd "cd\" /k

Hi guys. I've been on vacation so I missed this thread but I wanted to say that I'm very interested in SPC music.

It's true it's "just" wavetable music so it's less unique, but the SPC 700 has unique features when it comes to ADSR enveloppes, noise, echo and pitch modulation. BTW the SPU inside the Playstation has extremely similar features, just 24 channels instead of just 8.
Pitch modulation takes the output of a channel, envelope-adjusted but not volume adjusted, and use it to modulate next channel's pitch. Squresoft games used it a lot in their sound effects, but I don't remember any other games using it. It sounds extremely cool IMO, just hear the how the most powerful attacks of Chrono Trigger sounds and you'll see what I mean.

Another "feature" is to have unstable-looping samples to create white-noise like samples. Again, Squaresoft used it a lot for their sound effects, Capcom too, but most companies never used this awesome feature.

Like someone here said, samples should be resampled if they loop so it's an integer # of BRR blocks which is looped (a BRR block is 16 samples). I think the Playstation has something very similar, but blocks of 28 samples instead, which at first sound "even worse". Games still managed to sound good on this system - resampling first is just needed. I wrote a java program called BRRTools that is able to encode .wav samples into SNES BRR, test their stability and resample them in a few different ways so this should be no problem anymore. Go to http://www.romhacking.net to find it.

The problem tough is likely the assembler. I have written some playback code for the SPC700 once with wla-dx, and I lost the source altough I still have one compiled .spc of it. I remember the SPC700 version of wla-dx really had a lot of bugs, sometimes it just didn't assemble what you told it to, sometimes you had to add parenthesis arround your expressions for it to work (like something like MOV A, Table+X didn't work but something like MOV A, (Table)+X worked), and this sucks. This was definitely troublesome.

Actually it's MOV A,[Table+x] for indirect addressing and MOV A,Table+x for absolute addressing
The one thing I had problems with was the BBC/BBS instruction, until someone here pointed out that for some strange reason wla-spc700 expects a space between the variable and the dot. I don't recall any other big problems. If I was unsure about some syntax I looked it up in the opcode listing on the wla-dx website.