Yeah #10 is literally fucking insane, good job Rushjet (or whoever wrote it but that is my first educated guess.) There are even cool little secret loops depending on where you start playing wtf.
#10 sure is a technical masterpiece, but a different entry won me over with its sheer brilliance in the melodic department.
That said, #10 is a peculiar thing. Prepare for wall of text.
I've been trying to do what I usually do with top-notch songs: Separate the channels and make a stereo-mix! This has proven impossible for a bunch of reasons. The first thing I tried was exporting each channel from famitracker. Turns out they get desynced during the export (!) and it fails. Next attempt, exporting the .NSF and soloing each channel in VirtuaNSF. Pointless, since it plays at roughly 1/6th speed. NSFPlay 2.2 has a different issue, with the FDS being terribly offkey.
So I finally tried exporting the full song, all channels, from famitracker. Default settings (1 loop) stops halfways through, but exporting by time works.
Does this expose a bunch of bugs, or is this all intended behaviour somehow?
On a more on-topic note, passing my votes in now. Not having used the FDS at all until now, I somehow didn't expect such high-quality originals in this section... Great work guys, hope to see #X, #Y and #Z in the top three. I'm looking forward to last place!
Next attempt, exporting the .NSF and soloing each channel in VirtuaNSF. Pointless, since it plays at roughly 1/6th speed.
VirtuaNSF, like most Japanese players, is locked at the 60.09 Hz vsync frequency, making impossible to play PAL NSFs or NSFs with a different refresh rate.
tripflag wrote:
NSFPlay 2.2 has a different issue, with the FDS being terribly offkey.
High-speed FDS modulation is pretty much uncharted territory; no game used FM for anything other than vibrato, and no one (in the community at least) has been able to successfully test NSFs on a real FDS device so far. Low-speed modulation is fine, though.
tripflag wrote:
So I finally tried exporting the full song, all channels, from famitracker. Default settings (1 loop) stops halfways through, but exporting by time works. Does this expose a bunch of bugs, or is this all intended behaviour somehow?
I think it probably detects the C00 in the bonus song as the actual end of the module.
Entry #10 is indeed mind-blowingly awesome, but it is overclocked which is "kindof" cheating in my opinion. If I were you, I would either make it mandatory to stick to 60Hz or to overclock.
If I were you, I would either make it mandatory to stick to 60Hz or to overclock.
But you're not me, are you. :)
Overclocking is a misnomer anyway. You're not overclocking anything, you're just sending instructions to the CPU at a faster rate. The CPU still functions at its normal clock frequency (which is 1.789773 MHz for the 2A03, and 1.662607 MHz for the 2A07). The 60.09 Hz (or 50 Hz) refresh rate is just a convention; it's just easier to insert a frame of music every time vsync happens than it is to define any arbitrary refresh rate. A good example of this convention is the GameBoy - the system never connects to a TV, so technically the audio device could use any refresh rate; 60 Hz was used purely because that's how it had always been done before (at Nintendo at least).
What I'm getting at is, there's no 'cheating' in making your NSF faster than 60 Hz, for the following two reasons:
1) The NSF format allows you to do it;
2) So does the Famicom/NES.
That's the basis on which I elected to allow nonstandard refresh rates. As for the 400 Hz limit in Famitracker, jsr himself says the number is arbitrary. Still, that's what I'll stick to since this contest revolves around Famitracker.
400hz is actually a reasonable upper bound on how fast the famitracker driver will run. I don't think it will run much faster than that on hardware, and in many cases (esp. with expansions) it might not even be capable of it.
