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FamiTracker
the community here seems to be under a flood of expansion chip mania, so how many people here are still into making more "plain" music like what may appear in an actual NES game, or use expansion chips "as intended"?
Yeah, I'd say there's still a very sizeable proportion of people who are very passionate about how NES music should be nothing but 2A03, and look down upon expansion chips, raw PCM, sometimes even "creative" DPCM usage... If you don't believe me, try hanging around in #mod_shrine during a Famicompo Mini stream. I think in a lot of those cases, the reason is that that person views the NES (or Famicom) strictly as a console, and write music for it as a form of expression of their nostalgia.
However, as time goes, and as the chiptune (specifically the NES chiptune) community grows, more and more people who have never owned an NES (let alone a Famicom) start using FamiTracker. The result is that [i]those[/i] people treat the Famicom as a mere 8-bit synthesiser, and have no qualms against using TEN MILLION EXPANSION CHIPS and using the Famicom in ways that would not have been possible in the console's era (such as using more than 16 kB of DPCM samples).
Personally, I'm sort of halfway inbeteen those two stances. I write music in FamiTracker because I enjoy the sounds of the NES/Famicom more than any other 8-bit machine, not out of nostalgia for the NES sound; however I understand the importance of (at least the importance some people give to) remembering what the quintessential NES sound is about, and fully respect those who would rather stick to classic 2A03. But despite that I appreciate the fact there are modern tools that allow one to go beyond what composers in the 80's and 90's could do with the Famicom and its expansions.
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Being influenced by the original NES composers and wanting to use the 2A03 form because of that, is no more nostalgic than being influenced by any other "old" genre of music. By the same token, there is nothing wrong with wanting to branch out and try something new...hence, multiple expansions can certainly produce worthwhile music (for instance, [url=http://mmlshare.com/tracks/view/378]this).
As for myself, I prefer (for composing) the 2A03 form for a few reasons. It's a quick and dirty process, difficult to get lost or carried away in the process of sound design. Also, it's good practice for writing memorable melodies and counter-melodies...with no chords to "fill in the gaps", it becomes sort of a challenge. And I like hanging onto the possibility of hearing my tunes on a NES console (which I suppose is a little nostalgic yes).
I prefer working with the plain NES sound, myself. I've made exceptions to this, for various reasons (collaboration, desire for extra polyphony, or just playing around), but my default position is to keep it NES only. A big part of this is the nostalgia, yes. I grew up playing NES. I never had a Famicom. I have no special affection for the expansions.
There are [url=http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9757]very few Famicom cartridge games that used audio expansions for music, and IMO there are only two games that made worthwhile use of them: Gimmick! and Akumajou Densetsu. Some chips I would just never seriously consider composing for, like the N163, or VRC7, because there is similar hardware that sounds much better. At least with the NES there is a characteristic combination of sounds that belongs only to it. The N163, for example, is just a generic wave sampler with some very harsh design compromises. The only ones I've released music for are VRC6 and MMC5, and only for covers, either because of a collaboration where VRC6 was a given premise, or where I was unwilling to sacrifice polyphony to fit on the NES. A square wave is a square wave, so I wouldn't say VRC6 or MMC5 is a poor version of some other synthesizer, like I would of VRC7, but because they appeared in almost no games, their combination is extremely arbitrary, which usually draws me away from them. If I'm going to work with a set of limitations, I like it to be well established, not just some random combination of stuff that was used once and then never again.
I also don't like using DPCM very much, for several reasons.
First, probably at least half of the NES library didn't even use DPCM in its music (e.g. Super Mario Bros, Mega Man, Star Tropics, Battletoads, Silver Surfer). This is mostly because it came with some rather strict memory usage requirements, requiring a compromise in how you structure your game code. So... while the "NES sound" certainly can include DPCM, there's a well established no-DPCM subcategory (Famicompo calls it 'classical'), and I enjoy it more. Without the DPCM to provide wildcard sounds, I'm forced to do everything through the pure chippy parts of the 2A03.
Secondly, it sounds terrible. This is again about being a crappier version of something else. The NES DPCM is just about the worst sampler I can think of. If I wanted to compose music for square waves and a sampler, I'd probably choose IT or Buzz or something similar as a format. I don't have a desire to shoehorn an idea into the NES if I think it'd sound better in a less limited environment. I enjoy the challenge of working within the limitations of the NES, but the challenge is hiding those limitations, not showing them off (with crummy samples). If I use DPCM, I try to be careful to use it in a way that's either characteristic of NES games that did use it (e.g. noisy bass drum and snare), or in some novel way that masks, trivializes, or embraces the poor quality you get from it.
Thirdly, there is DPCM "abuse". DPCM bankswitching in particular, I am not very interested in. As I mentioned above, there are some severe memory limitations that made this mostly unviable in NES games. To be able to do DPCM bankswitching, they needed special memory mapper chips built into the cartridge. I've been looking for a while, and to day the only games I've seen actually bankswitch DPCM are Mr. Gimmick and Return of the Joker, which have 2 8k DPCM banks. For a long time Famitracker was limited to 16k of DPCM and no bankswitching, and this was already enough to contain all the DPCM for any existing game! (Famitracker afforded 16k instead of 8k banks because it's not trying to fit a whole NES game in the same space.) Some people around here might call DPCM bankswitching "pushing the hardware to its limit", but really all we've done is create new fantasy hardware (i.e. the NSF mapper, which is a modern construction) that handles it easily. PCM mixing is basically the same thing-- cramming PCM data into an NES game required [url=http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8675]huge compromises, and feats of engineering. Simply throwing more memory at it via the modern NSF mapper is rather mundane. The engineering required to make SuperNSF was interesting as a tech demo, but it's worthless as a compositional tool, because in the end it's just another crappy sampler. Unless you wrote SuperNSF, you're not pushing anything, you're just [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ZEczIYbUQ]playing with a toy. There is not really any interesting compositional problem that comes from trying to work with SuperNSF.
There are other forms of DPCM abuse which I actually find quite interesting. Ramps to adjust the [url=http://famitracker.com/forum/posts.php?id=1703]volume of the triangle. Looped waveforms like in [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzFQdcDMvGU]The Immortal. Blargg's [url=http://blargg.8bitalley.com/misc/nes-saw/]DPCM IRQ saw wave. These are things that I think are actually working with the hardware on its own terms, and not simply taking advantage of modern hardware (NSF) that did not exist at the time of the NES. [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEgoYUzwabI]Sunsoft bass was a cool thing, though if you're going to use the technique now, I appreciate it more if you [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltJIWD28Ebo]do your own thing with it rather than just ape Sunsoft's work.
Oh, lastly, there are several things about the DPCM unit that I think are design mistakes. Aside from the memory constraints I already mentioned, the sample sizes are one byte larger than they should be, wasting even more ROM space, but also completely messing up the tuning table, which was clearly designed for the samples to be looped without that extra byte. The tuning table itself is awful, sacrificing more practical samplerates (e.g. there is no usable in-tune octave in the table) to [url=http://famitracker.com/forum/posts.php?id=3424]make a major scale, which was rendered unusable by the extra-byte bug. There are some other issues with it too, but the DPCM as a whole seems undercooked to me, and for the first few years of the Famicom's life developers weren't even willing to use it, for the most part!
Anyhow, this is why I tend not to use expansions or DPCM very much. This isn't to say I don't approve of other people using them. Good music is good music, and I don't really care how you got there if it's well made. I'm just talking mostly about my own motivations for avoiding these things.
Personally, I usually make a vanilla NES version without DPCM, if I am even making anything with additional expansion.
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"im going to continue making this crazy stuff then after a while my style will be so sick that you will be like damn suuun that shit is so sick i dont even get it. i will be like bro its ok.. you dont have to." -omgdonut
Who the hell wants to 'limit' their creativity? Just makes no damn sense to me. I always try to write a track in 2A03, but 10 minutes later, VRC6 takes over just because I always have ideas for more than just 2 pulses. Of course it's always possible to condense those ideas, but I dunno, I used to cry about expansions not sounding authentic, but after hearing so much great tunes from the community, I slowly felt I had to give it a spin myself. I guess I kinda fell in love with it. I think people who manage to write great 2A03 tracks are amazing. They blow my mind, because they seem to know how to get our imaginations going with so little. When I am writing a track I always feel chords HAVE to be playing in the Background, as if no one could just imagine it while only singles notes actually play. I really should work on that...
But for now I am taking a long break from Famitracker, My wrists/forearms are killing me because of work and too much PC. Doctor said it is probably Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and I am terrified. Hopefully things will work out.....
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[url=http://soundcloud.com/fezuke/sets]My 8-Bit Soundcloud
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Sorry to hear, Fezuke. Hope it turns out well and, if not, hope you feel better.
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"im going to continue making this crazy stuff then after a while my style will be so sick that you will be like damn suuun that shit is so sick i dont even get it. i will be like bro its ok.. you dont have to." -omgdonut
[quote=Cheez]the community here seems to be under a flood of expansion chip mania, so how many people here are still into making more "plain" music like what may appear in an actual NES game, or use expansion chips "as intended"?[/quote]
I've never liked expansion chips all that much, and often when I use one, I later find a way to make the tune work with pure 2A03, and I often find the result better-sounding than what I had before. I only have one tune that I consider finished where I used an expansion chip (Eye of the Tiger) -- I still don't know how I'd handle that one without MMC5.
I have, however, found that lately I am prone to what I call "DPCM abuse" -- using DPCM to fill out the sound in ways that real NES composers rarely did, often using much more ROM space than they were usually able to. This might be as simple as using a pad with a bass drum, or it might involve constructing a complete multi-bar loop of some kind. My use of this technique seems to have met with mixed reception so far -- some people think it's awesome, but others think that a blend of more "realistic" sounds and the traditional bleeps and bloops doesn't sound that good.
In my case, I may also be painting myself into a corner. It seems to set a new standard for my music that would be difficult for me to meet every time. Some of my current output is stuff I would have found satisfactory a year or two ago, but just sounds plain to me now, so I feel forced to focus on other ideas...
[quote=rainwarrior]Some people around here might call DPCM bankswitching "pushing the hardware to its limit", but really all we've done is create new fantasy hardware (i.e. the NSF mapper, which is a modern construction) that handles it easily.[/quote]
Well, there's no reason that an equivalent mapper couldn't have been made back in the day, especially towards the end of the NES's life, when transistors and whatnot were obviously cheaper than they were in, say, 1988. A lot of games also wasted a lot of ROM space, either wasting it outright by having lots of empty space at the end of each bank, or by not compressing data as well as they could have. Knowing the world of game development, this was probably due to crazy production schedules -- it was easier to just give a game a bigger ROM than to figure out how to squeeze every byte of ROM space you can. So it's my contention that many games might have actually had a lot of room for fancy DPCM if they weren't limited by their production schedules.
Let's also not forget that music was a low priority for many game programmers. The craptastic music engines that many games were saddled with is proof of this. If the composer wanted more possibilities, he was at the mercy of the programmers on several levels -- what they were willing to spend time on implementing, what ROM space was available, what CPU time was available. The reason Tim Follin's music was amazing is he worked with programmers who knew a thing or two about what the NES was capable of.
I personally prefer expansions, just because of having extra channels and less limitations to work with. 2A03 only doesn't really attract me, but sure it's fun to make or listen to good songs with it. However, I mainly get bugged by it because you either have to squash everything to fit in three melodic channels or you have to use arps, and I don't react well to arps, they remind me of a nasty object which I don't want to mention.
Whenever I have made 2A03 tracks I have failed miserably, leading to just something that doesn't even qualify as a doodle. Increasing channels in those cases would have been even worse, since anything could have been playing through them.
For each expansion chip I have some preferences, like for VRC6, which is the chip I most liked in the past and the first one I ever used, but now I feel that it's always the same old sound and actually nothing very astounding to listen to.
N163 is the one I used the past months for writing my songs. It's fun to mess with the waves but the sound quality is horrendous.
VRC7 is too limited and a couple patches are either useless or very similar between them, like 13, 14 and 15, and having only one custom patch makes writing something good a true challenge.
I once made an original song with FDS, and sure it was fun! I like to have only one extra channel which makes lots of things rather than having a lot of them which can be rendered useless. It's a cool expansion to make bass, and the remaining channels can be used for anything your imagination can produce.
MMC5 is, in my opinion, the less interesting expansion chip due of the fact that the channels are very similar to 2A03's pulses and they have no distinctive behavior over the remaining expansions. I have found some good songs which implemented this chip, but it still doesn't draw my attention.
For the past few days I have experimented with the unfinished S5B expansion and although the Square channels are very plain they fit well in accompaniment roles. The waves resemble a feeling of primitive music, in my opinion, and it's fun to listen to when you make simple melodies.
About DPCM, I hate it! It can make good drum sounds and some clever sound effects but working with it is a mess. I am a bit bored of using that channel in my songs and since triangle waves plus noise can make a fair good job in creating consistent percussions they render the DPCM channel as a "use at your own madness risk".
Multi-expansion is to drive you nuts, and having a look at an FT module is like trying to read something in a foreign language that you will never understand, thus leading to a "What the hell does this do!?".
Before DC7, one of my test modules was one of the covers in pure 2A03. It sounded good, but DPCM drowned everything! I never finished it so my consciousness wouldn't haunt me with a cheater feeling.
As a conclusion, the use of expansions is something up to the end user. As it's possible to make good tracks with them, the most advanced people will just throw a pure 2A03 module that will sound awesome either way you see it. A good example of this would be Kulor's Space Dolphin's Space Cave demo song. That song was very impressive the first time I listened to it. I personally prefer expansions, but as long as you don't get very off the edge with them, like using all 8 Namco channels or implementing all the VRC7 plus 2A03 ones in the same song. I like being limited, that makes me compose better, and that's why I use FamiTracker for my music, because of the basic chip music feeling, the fact that it's easy to use and just being limited! I wouldn't do good with 25 channels in hand!
EDIT: My opinion doesn't apply to how real hardware manages things, but it makes me rather sad that in order to play one of my songs in it you have to make a lot of tedious stuff just to be able to listen to my music coming out from the console. That makes me wish to compose in pure 2A03.
[quote=furrykef]Well, there's no reason that an equivalent mapper couldn't have been made back in the day...[/quote]
You [i]could[/i] have put lots of things on a cart back then. There's even a chinese famicom cart that plugs in a cassette tape player to read you illustrated books with a soundtrack. For DPCM bankswitching specifically, MMC3 and FME-7 can both handle it well. I wasn't arguing at all about what is potentially possible with the hardware. What I was saying is that all of this potential is completely arbitrary, and therefore uninteresting to me from the standpoint of trying to compose music.
I'm actually quite interested in the expansion hardware from programming/tech perspective, and this is why I maintain NSFPlay, but I really have little interest in composing for systems that are just accidental consequences of Kevtris' NSF mapper.
I enjoy writing longer and more "complex" songs with expansions, and only using DPCM for drums and maybe a silly voice sample or two. I really dislike it when people add tons of synths or other sounds into the DPCM because at that point, for me, you are ruining the entire point of using the chip. I do write a lot of tunes in 2A03 however, I just tend to not publish them, I really enjoy the sound of it and the simplicity of it, as well asI trying to set your focus on making the song capture the listeners attention another way. And I never get why everyone hates on VRC7 so much, I understand it's faults, but I really enjoy trying to overcome all of them and make something worthwhile out of it, knowning that the song you created took not just the effort of imaging your melodies, harmonies ,etc, but also the effort of trying to use a small pallet of sounds and balancing them all out. Yes, it is easier to write it in another program which would enable you to use all kinds of sounds, but it doesn't have the same accomplishment for me. Or maybe I'm just crazy and I like to needlessly limit myself.
But getting back on topic, I love classical 2A03 and I have a small collection of personal compositions for that chip. I just don't post many, or they have been swamped by better songs
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[quote=Doxic]I really dislike it when people add tons of synths or other sounds into the DPCM because at that point, for me, you are ruining the entire point of using the chip.[/quote]
I couldn't disagree more. For one thing, using DPCM is hardly a free ride into getting whatever sound you want. There's a song I'm working on where I really, really want a piano sound. Wrote the loop in OpenMPT and everything, got it sounding beautiful. Then I try putting it into DPCM... and it sucks! It seems to me DPCM just can't do piano sounds. No matter how I fiddle with the sound, it sounds horribly dissonant, a lot like clipping (even though it's not clipping in the usual sense). There are still technical limitations to grapple with, challenges to overcome.
Second, what do you think the NES composers of old would have done if they had ROM space to spare (a question I addressed in my previous post) and a kickass music engine like FT's? They'd push the limits of the hardware, of course. Hell, some games got creative with the DPCM channel back in the day, like Action 52's "Woo! Yeah!" loop and the speech synthesis in Big Bird's Hide & Speak. I think taking full advantage of the 2A03's capabilities is entirely within the spirit of the NES.
Can I just say (because I'm in NO position to talk), even though 99% of what I post has some expansion or another (even the two shitty originals I wrote a year-and-a-half ago, both used FDS). I thoroughly enjoy the sound of the 2A03. Every time I potentially cover a song, I think "can I fit this into three tonal channels?". If I can't (or I think it would sound better with an expansion), then I use an expansion. I love the 2A03, though. This can be seen by my metaphorical hard-on for arpeggios.
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