Well, I don't know if it's REALLY linear interpolation that I'm talking about, I just said interpolate linearly (which could mean a different thing), but here's the difference between how you should and shouldn't do it, though it's different for every instrument.
EDIT: I made another one, to show how it's done for another instrument. I also included an example of both overdoing it when doing it the right way, and just doing it wrong.
Oh, I understand. The original wave is very choppy and sounds piercing. The one in instrument 01 is badly interpolated since it doesn't resemble the original wave and it sounds too smooth, and the one in instrument 02 is interpolated in a way so it doesn't sound piercing but it resembles the original wave.
Great, thanks for the example!
And the edited one is similar, though it shows two ways of how NOT to do it.
Because if you introduce a big gap between two values, the wave will sound less smooth and could decrease its quality if many of these gaps are included in the wave. Kind of the difference between a triangle wave and a pulse or sawtooth wave.
However, having a small range of values could mean that the volume range of the wave is limited, but the N163 sounds loud enough so this is not necessarily a big problem.
I see what you meant about the N106 ver. of your tune, don't get me wrong the N106 has some choppy waveforms but find a nice waveform then you are good to go. I mainly like to use N106 chip to emulate the Gameboy's third channel (For bass), which you could pull off a gameboy'ish tune
This is correct to some point, about finding a good waveform, but it will most likely only work when using few channels (up to 5, maybe?) because the N163 not only produces a lot of aliasing when more channels are enabled, it also produces a dreaded hiss at 17.5 KHz when using 7 channels or 20 KHz when using 8. This destroys a song despite having good waveforms in it.
Using it for Gameboy-ish stuff is pretty neat actually, even if you can't emulate it 100%. I usually go with it when I need many waveforms of a certain type or when I need a certain amount of channels to work with.
Working with the N163 expansion is fun though, despite its terrible quirks and limitations. No, even better, working with the NES/Famicom sound hardware is fun.
[Thread derailing expert level, but don't worry guys, it's been interesting so far]
