nesdev.org

Memblers wrote:one of the coolest sound tricks ever is one blargg found - NES DMC Saw Wave (does square and triangle as well). With controllable volume! It's a little disappointing that no one seems to be using this yet.

Nobody uses it yet because NSF doesn't handle IRQs.

I tried tinkering around with the sample used in The Immortal, but attempts to repitch it or do anything more advanced with it in famitracker was met with failure.

tepples wrote:

Memblers wrote:one of the coolest sound tricks ever is one blargg found - NES DMC Saw Wave (does square and triangle as well). With controllable volume! It's a little disappointing that no one seems to be using this yet.

Nobody uses it yet because NSF doesn't handle IRQs.

Which again brings us to http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?p=64606#64606

This little demo features a unique effect that I have never seen in any NSF: basically when I play a bass sample, I have two parts, the beginning and the loop, and they play in one shot. Looping correctly a sample is pretty difficult due to the way the DMC loops... Also I'm using writes to $4011 to enhance a bit the drum.

Hey, that's pretty cool.

Another technique I used once was stringing together a bunch of small samples by using the DMC IRQ to trigger the next one. Doesn't seem to be done much. That's how my speech synth worked, with 16kB of DPCM samples.

Very cool thing RushJet1 ! At least someone else experimented with the FDS channel. You'd want to visit here to see what I've done with it.

Performance post in performance topic

I don't think most folks enjoy talking about expansion chip music, or they just complain that we're not limiting ourselves enough or some crap, but I have to face facts that back in the early 2000s when I jumped from listening to game soundtracks in emulated formats to beginnings of nsf homebrew, Moondemo was one of the things that blew my mind.

People love to complain about wank. Sometimes, I find it rightfully so. That's why whenever I took part in a famicompo, I tried to introduce something I learned from screwing 'round with the N106 in mml. I'm sure someone happened upon sweeping through custom patterns mid-note, since it's all over the square waves, or C64, FM synth, etc... tepples had a wonderful name for the effect some thread back but I don't remember the name. Soft sampling is all that comes to mind, but I know that isn't it. I got some slap bass and violins out of it that made me generally happy.

Eventually I got concerned about relying on DPCM with the expanded sound. Lately I've been trying to make good Percussion sound with the channels. Last Famicompo I was trying to make a good sounding Timpani for a cover, when I completely stumbled upon an effect I was thinking about how to create for awhile: simulated noise. Granted, for that while I wanted to try to make DPCM in a way that would make a good looped noise sound on that channel, while being a single finite pattern...but this works too!

(also, now that I think about it, TONs of early arcade games I bet did the same sort of thing when trying to make noisy explosions. Gorf comes to mind.)

(ALSO, I find it really really cool hearing noise like effects out of the squarewaves on Neil's pulsar tracker!)

This years compo, I wanna take the concepts further but since I'm not an actual coder, I've about run into the limits of what I can think of doing useful with the chip. The last thing I'd love to see is someone simulate prerendered soundwaves similar to how FM synth channels have been used on the Genesis to add extra pcm effects.

I thought of simulating noise with pitched channels back when I was trying to make pretend modem sounds with an IBM PC's beeper in QBasic. Early 300 baud POTS modems used ITU V.21, a primitive form of frequency modulation. This gave way to phase modulation at 1200 bps, then various QAM rates up to 33600 bps.

As for wank: I seem to remember that the minimalistic soundtrack of Metroid was Hip Tanaka's response to the epidemic of wank among NES composers at the time.

Very cool! When you said that, it made me wonder if anyone has attempted to make music out of modem signals. Not a remix, but software hacks to send tones to the thing, kinda like how some very very old computers sent signals to separate radio speakers to hear simple music....

No, ionustron, we're not against expansion chips ! What you made is in fact very cool. It's true the N106 is REALLY overkill, but it's nice to use it anyway !
The only thing I'd be against is people that use more than an expansion chip at a time. I happened to find a .nsf of Chrono Cross' intro which sounded good but it was using FDS + N106 + VRC7 which noes not make any sense.

It would never be possible to convert it on .nes format, let alone to a cartridge. Also, it's not possible to test N106 stuff on the real hardware with a real N106 because all known carts are made of non-replacable epoxy blobs, but what you did with the N106 is cool nevertheless.