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FamiTracker
Hey everyone, I'm new around here and had a question about how sound design works in FamiTracker. I did a quick search on "volume" and didn't find any posts that answered my question so I figured I'd ask.
Mex pointed me in the direction of the NSFImport tool so I could study how real NES games designed their instruments, but like many of you know, the way the NSFImport tool (thanks for making it rainwarrior!) imports to FTM is by putting all the instrument effects in the channel the note is being played.
I was messing around with the instrument editor in order to try and recreate sounds by attempting to interpret the effects information into the appropriate effects in the Instrument editor, however I am missing some information and can't seem to reproduce the sounds 100%.
My question is this: How many increments in the Instrument editor's effects are equal to one row in the Pattern editor? Is there a set, hard-coded value that never changes, or can this relationship be altered by changing the speed and/or tempo of the song?
Looking at the information presented to me, it looks like the Instrument Editor's information is independent of the speed/tempo the song is played at, considering the Instrument editor represents things in ms, while the amount of time it takes to step through a row is dictated by the speed and tempo.
The NES was synched with a television scan that resets 60 times a second. This timing is used to synchronize updates to the sound hardware.
So... the instrument editor doesn't have anything to do with rows. Each entry will last 1/60th of a second.
If you leave the tempo setting at 150, the speed setting tells you how many 60hz frames there are per row. i.e. at tempo 150 speed 6 (the default), each row lasts 6 frames, so if you have an instrument then 6 entries of its macro will be executed each row. The NSFImporter uses speed 1, so every row is 1 frame.
If you change the tempo setting, though, the relationship breaks down as the engine will kind of round things to the nearest 60hz frame. Generally the tempo gets very slighlty uneven at this point, and you can't predict with certainty whether a particular row lasts, say, 5 or 6 frames.
Interesting. So the speed setting is how many frames each row lasts?
I think I'll stay away from messing with the tempo at the moment as this allows me to have basically a 1:1 relationship with the frames in the song and the instrument editor.
Thanks so much!
EDIT: This is totally working. I've now successfully recreated a few instruments from Kabuki Quantum Fighter.
Sorry for the double post, but I feel like this fits into the thread I already created, but didn't want it to be skipped over in my last post as this is a new question regarding the same topic.
If you have effect commands in a channel AND you have entries in the instrument's envelope, it appears as though it does some kind of combining of overlapping effects. For instance, say I have a volume envelope drawn out that looks like (8 8 8 2 2 2) for Instrument 01. I decide to play this in the Square 1 channel, and then put two consecutive notes, the second one having a value of 8 in the volume effect. The second note is noticeably quieter than the first one.
Are all effects that exist both in the Instrument Editor and the Channel FX additive in nature?
The volume column gets multiplied by your instrument's volume envelope macro, more or less (it kinda rounds up).
The rules for which takes precedence or whether it's additive are different for different effects and instrument macros. Pxx, 4xx, and pitch macros I believe are all additive with each other, but duty cycle macros will take precedence over Vxx effects. Axx basically adjusts the volume column automatically (and every volume column entry will reset it). There's more but I don't want to go on forever. At the top of the page, try clicking on "Wiki". There's a lot of good information there.
