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FamiTracker
In FamiTracker 0.3.0, you can have a minimum of 5 sound channels. This is the default, using no expansion chips. It gives you 2 square wave channels, 1 noise channel, 1 triangle wave channel & 1 audio sample channel.
With the MMC5 expansion chip, you get 2 extra channels; both of them produce pulsating square waves.
With the VRC6 expansion chip, you get 3 extra channels; 2 extra square wave channels & 1 sawtooth wave channel.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
simultaneous/multi-expansion support is not yet implemented either, but when it is you could potentially have 17 channels with the currently supported expansions, or 28 once N106 and SUNSOFT5 are supported as well. quite why you'd want that many is another matter however ;D
Multiple expansion chips are supported by the tracker internally, but it cannot yet export multi-chip songs to NSF so I've made it possible to enable only a single chip at the moment.
FDS is incompatible with most other chips, but I believe the rest can be enabled simultaneous so maximum number would be 27 when N106 and 5B is supported.
[quote=jsr]FDS is incompatible with most other chips[/quote]
huh, interesting, i didn't realise that. just looking through nsfs at the moment, i've found some that are FDS+VRC6, and a couple that are FDS+MMC5+N106. so those combinations must work at least. i haven't ever seen an nsf that uses all expansions however.
[quote=Dave][quote=jsr]FDS is incompatible with most other chips[/quote]
huh, interesting, i didn't realise that. just looking through nsfs at the moment, i've found some that are FDS+VRC6, and a couple that are FDS+MMC5+N106. so those combinations must work at least. i haven't ever seen an nsf that uses all expansions however.[/quote]
I haven't seen a single FDS game that uses expansion chips other than that found in the floppy drive.
Considering that FDS stands for Famicom Disk System (which carried no other expansion chips,) I highly doubt that they're compatible with FDS because these chips interact with each other (& the Famicom's motherboard) differently.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
[quote=Dave][quote=jsr]FDS is incompatible with most other chips[/quote]
huh, interesting, i didn't realise that. just looking through nsfs at the moment, i've found some that are FDS+VRC6, and a couple that are FDS+MMC5+N106. so those combinations must work at least. i haven't ever seen an nsf that uses all expansions however.[/quote]
You sure they're not NSFe?
Tsu Ryu's original entries in FCM I (FDS+VRC6)
KAY's Chrono Cross cover in FCM II (FDS+MMC5+N106)
bob's F-Zero GX title cover in FCM II (FDS+N106)
Xaimus "Dendrite" in FCM VI (FDS+MMC5+N106)
[quote=Dave]huh, interesting, i didn't realise that. just looking through nsfs at the moment, i've found some that are FDS+VRC6, and a couple that are FDS+MMC5+N106. so those combinations must work at least. i haven't ever seen an nsf that uses all expansions however.[/quote]
Yeah I know some NSFs use combinations like that anyway, but that's cheating. The reason is because FDS has RAM in the same area where other sound chips registers are located (VRC6, VRC7 & Sunsoft). Other chips are probably OK
I'm using a hack in my NSF player that simply disables RAM if it is playing a multi-chip NSF (and I guess other players also do something similar), but it is against the NSF specification. It doesn't broke anything however, since no real FDS game had multiple chips and I haven't seen a multichip NSF that uses the RAM anyway.
Like I said, the Famicom Disk System drive itself is what contained the sound chip, along with the RAM & the stepper motor (to control the floppy's read/write access).
The drive itself, as jsr said, uses the same memory registers for the RAM module that normal cartridges would use for other expansions. I highly doubt that other chips would be OK, though, because there may be some chips that use the same memory locations as the drive's stepper motor, I/O path or other components related to floppy disk data access.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
But when you try to run the NSFs under real hardware, it will glitch out, even though it should technically work on an emulator (since they don't fully emulate all the quirks of the system).
MML & its NSF assembling abilities aren't completely faithful to the actual specs of the Famicom as it really treats each individual channel as nothing more than individual sound paths. In reality, each sound path occupies a certain number of memory locations in the 6502/6510, as do the hand-shaking signals of each expansion chip.
This means the following in terms of hardware:
1. No two expansion chips may occupy the same hand-shaking or data registers without interfering with each other's audio information or hand-shaking signals.
2. The hand-shaking signals must interact with the CPU such that the console can properly calculate the full number of expansion chips (which is as limited as the ROM data's memory footprint).
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
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