nesdev.org

I'm sure I've asked this before but it's been awhile. Has anything changed or just in general what sort of sound engine tools are available to anyone for NES these days? FamiTracker is very popular for people that just want to make NES music. But last I checked it was totally unsuited for using in a game, didn't support sound effects for example, and probably is heavy on cpu usage.

So what options if any exist if someone wanted to add some music and sound effects to their game? Is it still pretty much:

* add FamiTracker NSF and have no sound effects
* try to hack FamiTracker to add some sort of sound effect ability on your own
* program your own engine sound engine and tools

MottZilla wrote:* program your own engine sound engine and tools

Personally, I'm taking this route. As a bonus, I get to learn a lot of new things along the way. =)

But yeah, I agree that it would be nice if there was a general purpose sound engine floating around.

Go ahead and use the one in LJ65 and Concentration Room if you can figure it out.

There's Dragnsf and Dragnsf 2, but for some reason, Drag wants to keep it semi-private. Maybe ask him for a copy?

Speaking of which, I have been working on a Famitracker to Dragnsf converter...
But Dragnsf lacks arpeggios.

I guess there is NT2, which have been modified to have sound effects in NESnake 2.

I have mine which supports sond effect, but it's currently extremely limited (no vibratoes, arpegios or wathever, and really simple vol. envelopes). It was designed to be extremely ROM and RAM efficient though. I plan to get it private, but if people really can't make sound engines nor use anything existing, I'd rather share it than see people release good games with no sound at all.

I plan to do a super sound engine and release it to the public though but it's only plans

Famitracker plugins

My hope for the plugin system is eventually there will be numerous sound drivers available that can suit different needs of homebrew developers. I developed an example driver and exporter for the plugin system. The example driver isn't very sophisticated, but it is what I'm using for my game and for relatively simple songs (transcribed classical songs with volume, pitch and duty sequences) it does the job. You're welcome to use that example and soup it up for your own needs, or develop a new plugin for your own sound driver.

There had been some concern at first that it would take a several-gigabytes download for anybody to participate and develop their own plugin; but as of the next release of Famitracker this should no longer be an issue. The dependencies on MFC have been removed; all you should need is a free C++ compiler that can compile win32 DLLs.

This sounds promising. I definitely want to look into it. Personally the prospect of having no sound or having to go through a battle to make my own sound engine and tools has discouraged me from seriously looking to put together a game. Silent games aren't very appealing.

Paging Dwedit: did you make progress on that Famitracker converter?

We were talking about Dragnsf on #nesdev and the source is semi-available now through Roth's Virus Buster game, so it'd be nice if it was more usable. It seems like a nice engine.

Shiru wrote a library called Famitone which supports a limited subset of Famitracker (and sound effects).

http://shiru.untergrund.net/code.shtml


Famitracker's driver itself isn't really designed to be used with anything else. I don't think CPU usage is too bad, but the driver size and RAM usage are a bit prohibitive. It's okay for a demo.[/url]

It is actually not too diffucult to take Famitone sound effects code (it is designed to be well separated from music code there), and hook it to Famitracker player. It'll increase memory (RAM and ROM) and CPU use, though, but still may be acceptable for some games.

And let's not forget about MUSE, another good engine to have music and sound effects.

Another thing, a shameless plug - I have an experimental chiptune tracker project called 1tracker, which easily could be used as front end for a custom NES music engine.

Shiru wrote:Another thing, a shameless plug - I have an experimental chiptune tracker project called 1tracker, which easily could be used as front end for a custom NES music engine.

Interesting concept!

I'll release DNSF2 with full documentation once I finish my latest game project, which was supposed to double as my testbed for DNSF2 in the first place.

The reason I'm not openly publically releasing it right now is because I don't feel comfortable publically releasing something I made without having had the chance to personally test it and polish it first. (Try finding that in the modern gaming industry ) So please don't think I'm hoarding it or something. :S

However, I only just now regained some free time for actual game development and programming (which also has to co-exist alongside my other hobbies), so I can't provide an ETA.

tokumaru wrote:

MottZilla wrote:* program your own engine sound engine and tools

Personally, I'm taking this route. As a bonus, I get to learn a lot of new things along the way. =)

I'm going that way too for the same reason.

Drag wrote:I'll release DNSF2 with full documentation once I finish my latest game project, which was supposed to double as my testbed for DNSF2 in the first place.

The reason I'm not openly publically releasing it right now is because I don't feel comfortable publically releasing something I made without having had the chance to personally test it and polish it first. (Try finding that in the modern gaming industry ) So please don't think I'm hoarding it or something. :S

However, I only just now regained some free time for actual game development and programming (which also has to co-exist alongside my other hobbies), so I can't provide an ETA.

I don't think anyone blames you, that is a good goal.

Although I don't think anyone really knows about it either, there are about six posts mentioning it at nesdev and they're mostly from two years ago (like this thread).

This one flew under the radar a lot, Bloopageddon by ReaperSMS uses an MML-ish format and is designed for use with videogames. Unfortunately in its "as-is" release state it does not support DPCM.