If anything I think this is probably normal behaviour (or closer to it than before) and the previous versions shouldn't even have played it fine in the first place. The VRC6 as we all know is an expansion for the Famicom, and there was no PAL Famicom, which is I suppose why the 2a03 plays fine in PAL mode while the VRC6 remains in 60Hz mode but shifts the pitch down to compensate? Just speculation though.
Ryukenden1, I'm not sure I understand you about the bug. It seems there's not enough memory to load all those DPCM samples at the same time. If you unload all the DPCM samples in the DPCM window, then you can load the other instrument just fine.
The VRC6 as we all know is an expansion for the Famicom, and there was no PAL Famicom, which is I suppose why the 2a03 plays fine in PAL mode while the VRC6 remains in 60Hz mode but shifts the pitch down to compensate?
But you can set a custom engine speed and make it 50Hz and it plays back just fine. The original could export to NSF just fine in anything before 3.7 so I don't really think I can stretch my mind to think this is just a feature.
The VRC6 as we all know is an expansion for the Famicom, and there was no PAL Famicom, which is I suppose why the 2a03 plays fine in PAL mode while the VRC6 remains in 60Hz mode but shifts the pitch down to compensate?
But you can set a custom engine speed and make it 50Hz and it plays back just fine. The original could export to NSF just fine in anything before 3.7 so I don't really think I can stretch my mind to think this is just a feature.
My guess is although usually the end result is the same in both cases, setting the PAL flag on an NSF and leaving the NTSC flag while changing the engine speed to 50Hz are two completely different processes. The VRC6 (and indeed all other expansions) wasn't designed to run in PAL mode - mode which happens to run at 50Hz - which is why it messes up with the way the VRC6 sounds. But Famitracker can 'force' the NTSC mode to run at a custom speed (such as 50Hz) by changing one particular register value in the NSF, which in Famitracker ends up sounding fine but breaks compatibility with most NSF players.
OR, I could just be talking right out of my arse and it actually is a bug.
NTSF with custom speed of 50hz is the way to go if you want 50hz VRC6. (Setting the PAL flag will disable expansions anyway on some NSF players.)
In the latest version, the expansions are told to always use NTSC pitch tables, even though the playback frequency is based on the PAL CPU rate. This is curious.
I believe in a real VRC6, the clock is driven by the NES CPU, so it would probably be appropriate to use PAL pitch tables for a VRC6 chip on PAL NES with an audio expansion mod. So... this is possibly a bug, but still outside the realm of the NSF format. (Simplest "fix" is probably just to force NTSC when using expansions.)
Expansion chips was only available for famicom which was NTSC, so I haven't bothered with period tables for PAL. It worked earlier (unintentionally), but not now when I changed some things (to make it easier to create period files without messing up).
Exported files are forced to NTSC if an expansion chip is enabled, so that should probably happen in the tracker too.