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FamiTracker
I find it interesting to see ow far hobbyist arcade builders can take their work.
But one thing I've noticed is the use of GameEx as a front-end for MAME. It has support for ambiance music, yet it can only play music files which are supported by Windows Media Player.
This means, if someone wants to set up ambiance music for their arcade project, they'd have to create an MP3, WAV or some other file type which can play under Windows Media Player.
Now, for all us retro fans, don't you think it would be more practical to integrate chiptune functionality into GameEx (or at least allow GameEx to access a music player that can support chiptunes)?
That way, if someone builds an arcade & wants to run their own covers as ambiance music, they can do so while saving hard drive space to run more games (seeing that NSFs & other chiptune formats are much smaller than 128 Kb/s MP3s).
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I would make an arcade if I knew how. Since I recently got a Family BASIC (NES Development Kit) I have to learn the BASIC programming language to make my own NES games.
The simple part is actually making the cabinet & the human interface (i.e.: the joysticks, screen, even the coin-op mechanism). The hard part is actually choosing what software you want to run for your arcade (since there are many programs that can run arcade & arcade-style games). On top of it, such games don't even need to be coin-ops (so MAME isn't even needed if you don't want it).
The thing here is that most people use MAME because it supports the coin-ops that they remembered playing when they were younger. That said, there are other emulators that can support coin-ops (including Nestopia; it can support Vs Unisystem & Playchoice 10 games). Since many people think that bigger is better, they tend to make their arcade boxes packed with a huge amount of games (including those that were never released as arcade games).
As a result, because many people use all kinds of different emulators, they use GameEx as a front-end executor to manage their repertoire. And this program is very well-made (it can even support customized skins & custom ambiance/demo music). The only problem is that you still need Windows Media Player on your system, as GameEx uses it to play MP3s that you assign.
Now, because arcade designers want to load the most games on their systems, they prefer to use their hard drives for ROM files rather than for custom MP3s. So I was thinking...
What if GameEx could support different chiptunes via a built-in player, instead of relying on Windows Media Player to play MP3s (which are typically much bigger in file size than chiptune files)? It would save space &, if GameEx actually had support for NSFs, arcade builders can download the tunes in the Show Off Your Work section, or even make their own tunes.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
That was exactly what I was thinking; MP3s & WAVs can't loop as well as raw chiptunes can.
But with so many front-ends that are open-source, maybe I (or someone else with even greater programming talent) can use Blargg's NES sound API or FamiTracker's NSF driver source to incorporate this ability. I'm definitely up to the challenge (even though I need to read on the specs much more). But if anyone else decides to do this, that guy would be awesome.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
Not sure if you saw the arcade game Rolling Thunder 2 but Ayako Saso (Composer to that game) told me she used a piece of software Namco had on a computer to create the music to that. Brad Fuller and Earl Vickers (Musicians for Marble Madness on arcade) said they used Music-V language and Earl said an example would be like if he typed in C4Q it would be a C, 4th octave and it is a quarter note. Vince Pontarelli (musician to the Cruisin arcade games) told me he used Digital Performer on the Macintosh.
Come to think about it, it actually was something very useful to add. Back than, you never really needed powerful computers to program the earlier arcade machines (considering that it all started in the early 80's & that migrating between different systems wasn't cheap or practical). So it's understandable that the earlier arcades are early computer systems that are basic enough to support direct sound synthesis.
However, for games like Tekken 3, Time Crisis 2 & the more modern arcade games made in the late 90's & up are more advanced computer systems (if not all-out PCs). That said, we should understand that music in the earlier systems could only be played directly via the program's controlling hardware, whereas the most current system are complicated enough to actually generate audio without any real need to directly control any hardware (i.e.: MP3s & WAVs can be played on modern systems thanks to audio codecs & their translating the file into machine code).
As a result, if someone were to build a MAME (or MAME-like) arcade box & wanted to play some ambient music, they'd have to rely on some sort of a software layer between their music files & their computer's motherboard. GameEx uses the audio codecs that ship with Windows to play MP3s. Other than that, my suggestion would have been to implement an NSF player to act as the codec for playing NSF files.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
[quote=TechEmporium]That was exactly what I was thinking; MP3s & WAVs can't loop as well as raw chiptunes can.[/quote]
Eh? WAVs can loop perfectly. Well, you need two WAVs if you want to loop past the beginning (one for the pre-loop stuff and another for the loop), but that's no big deal. The same can be done with OGGs, too, which are better than MP3s anyway and I really wish the world would switch over to them.
This doesn't change the fact that NSFs would be much smaller and cooler, of course.
Well, if you want to loop WAVs (or any other audio file) properly (which you can still do, regardless of format,) you still need two music files.
In GameEx, if you set ambient music, you'd need to use a play list. However, one problem does arise; since GameEx uses Windows Media Player as a base for music playback, you'd have to contend with playing song 1 once while trying to loop song 2 continuously. It's much easier with an NSF since the Bxx & Dxx effects make it easy to loop to a particular point in the entire song, but WAVs, MP3s & OGGs don't have this ability. Plus, I don't think that Windows Media Player can play two simultaneous, non-nested loops like this.
And yes; the open source audio & video formats (including Ogg Vorbis, Matroshka & FLAC) are much better than MP3s, AVIs & WAVs. The only sad thing is that the multimedia industry's forcing people to use their standards, regardless of efficiency.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
Eh? WAVs can loop perfectly. Well, you need two WAVs if you want to loop past the beginning (one for the pre-loop stuff and another for the loop), but that's no big deal. The same can be done with OGGs, too, which are better than MP3s anyway and I really wish the world would switch over to them.
This doesn't change the fact that NSFs would be much smaller and cooler, of course.
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A good example of this, everyone, is the Maze Of Galious remake by Brain Games. Take a look at the sound folder and you'll see what furrykef means. BTW, it also is capable of using OGG's as sound and not just WAV.
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However, unlike GameEx, Maze Of Galious does NOT use Windows Media Player to play the audio files. However, Maze Of Galious does use a better method of playing audio files. That said, the same thing can be achieved in any program if it's been programmed with FMOD's library.
FMOD-based programs (as well as other programs with special sound libraries) would require more than one file in order to play looped music (one for a few introductory measures & another for the main loop, as furrykef said). The sound files themselves would also have to be mastered so as to produce smooth transitions when flowing from file 1 to file 2.
With NSF, every song is contained within one single file. On top of it, each song can be called upon & executed by a program without having to fiddle around with anything (like mastering two sound files to properly loop/transition without any pause or break). Mind you, that would require a sound library capable of doing this; luckily, there's Blargg's sound library & jsr's NSF driver source.
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Technology: the one thing that's hated & cursed at by all engineers, technologists, scientists & technicians!
Good point, TechEmporium. Thanks for shedding some light on this. I really didn't know that (quite cool, actually), and I respect Brain games for their decision to use FMOD in their remake. Smart peeps indeed. =^ . _ . ^=
Besides, it seems that NSFs take up considerably less space than OGGs and extremely less than uncompressed WAVs (also quite cool).
That being said, I am looking forward to seeing it, if it is willed into existence, that is...
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You now process Dracula's Rib. Good luck processing it...
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