Oh, you could try asking for some advice over on nesdev - someone might spot a pattern in the behaviour and be able to suggest a remedy...
1 April 9, 2012 10:02 pm
Re: Putting NTRQ & Pulsar & PR8 on a Famicom cart (Guide) (97 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
2 April 9, 2012 10:01 pm
Re: Putting NTRQ & Pulsar & PR8 on a Famicom cart (Guide) (97 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
That is a bit weird. You'd imagine that the non-booting PR8 problem might be that there's no ability to utilise the blank .sav file that I distribute with the PR8 ROM for use with Powerpak but I do do some checking in the PR8 boot code for a 'signature' in the battery RAM - if it's not there I assume you either have an empty save file or have one that is 'corrupt' at which point the battery RAM is 'formatted' into a schema that PR8 requires.
I'd love to help more but absolutely have no means to test any of this stuff out. Maybe ne7 has some insight...
3 March 29, 2012 7:26 am
Re: Putting NTRQ & Pulsar & PR8 on a Famicom cart (Guide) (97 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
ne7 wrote:
ah thats rather brill - maybe you could fork Nestopia into a usable version for peeps Neil?
Ah, perhaps I should've been clearer - I didn't physically change anything on Nestopia just fiddled with stuff on my laptop (things that have moved/changed since OSX Lion etc.) and it now works, sort of. Enough to keep me going anyway
I really wish I could get the OSX code as I would have a go at building it.
4 March 28, 2012 8:29 am
Re: Putting NTRQ & Pulsar & PR8 on a Famicom cart (Guide) (97 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
After a few hours hacking around on my Mac I think (fingers crossed) that I've got Nestopia useable again.
5 March 27, 2012 10:05 pm
Re: Putting NTRQ & Pulsar & PR8 on a Famicom cart (Guide) (97 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Been trying to have a look at this tonight and have had a frustrating time. It seems that somewhere along the Mac OSX update line, Nestopia is kinda fucked up. It crashes all the time and has stopped writing to the battery files. In short, pretty unusable 
I emailed RIchard Bannister (guy who wrote the OSX port of Nestopia) a while back about sporadic crashes to do with sound emulation but I got no reply. My fear is, given that Nestopia hasn't been updated for over 3 years is that he's stopped developing it.
This is not good
6 March 27, 2012 10:01 am
Re: Putting NTRQ & Pulsar & PR8 on a Famicom cart (Guide) (97 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Very odd. I'll have a look. Worryingly though I think I nicked the reset stuff to fix Pulsar/PR8 from NTRQ code 
7 March 26, 2012 10:00 pm
Re: Soundcloud (152 replies, posted in General Discussion)
Not really chip-related but here's mine: http://soundcloud.com/neilbaldwin
Mainly just use it for modular/Elektron experimenting amongst other things...
8 March 26, 2012 7:30 pm
Re: 'NoisES' Demo (24 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Yeah, drone machine was the initial idea. I'll keep going at it when I get some time (which hasn't been much of late, hence the delayed release of this demo)
I do think I'll need to reduce the scope from the original idea. Probably just one LFO and one Envelope per voice. The important thing is to keep the processing as fast as possible. I have done the envelopes already they're just not in this demo.
The tricky bit with the synth engine has been to code the LFOs etc in a way that they can be totally scaled/modified on-the-fly. A simple LFO can be done very quickly but if you need to add scalability then processing gets a little more complex and consequently a little slower. The slower the processing the less intense the FM effect etc. It's an interesting little balancing trick
One of the odd/cool things is that the synth engine just processes the shit out of as much as it can so you'll get odd artefacts when processing gets shared between two (or more tasks e.g. a LFO and an envelope together won't be able to FM the pitch as fast compared to if you only had the LFO going). Ideally it wouldn't do this but it will add a bit of randomness/unpredictability into the mix which I kind of like.
I'll work towards making a proper demo with all 4 voices. I need to think more about a possible step sequencer so that will have to wait for the time being.
9 March 26, 2012 8:35 am
Re: 'NoisES' Demo (24 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Victory Road wrote:
Awesome! How difficult would it be to get the modulation speed to follow the pitch of a played note (like where a user could choose an octave or a harmonic and the modulation would play at that relative speed)? Would amplitude modulation also be possible? This is kinda really exciting!
The modulation/synth stuff is pretty flexible so that shouldn't be a problem. You can use the same technique to apply amplitude modulation. I did it as part of developing the demo but, perhaps because of the lack of amplitude resolution on the NES, the effects weren't that impressive and in some ways sound very similar to the 'FM' in the demo.
As well as 'FM', a lot of the characteristics of the sound in the demo comes from the fact that you've also got the infamous square-wave click being modulated at audio rate. I've also had it working with the Triangle channel which gives you a totally different sound. Haven't experimented with the noise channel yet though.
Very early days on this (even though it's several months old! )
I originally planned to have a very basic 16-step sequencer for each voice (2 square, triangle, noise) so that you can set several values per step: note, length and a couple of aux values. The aux values would be able to point to any of the parameters in the 'synth'
I did originally plan to have 6 LFOs and 6 Envelopes, the destination of which could be anything: pitch, other LFOs, amplitude etc.
I think that is too many though as the processing to get the sound is INTENSE. The more LFOs etc. that I have, the slower the 'FM' will be and so on.
10 March 25, 2012 9:04 pm
Topic: 'NoisES' Demo (24 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
11 March 19, 2012 8:49 pm
Re: Nintendo's original SFC (SNES) development samples...? (34 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Good times...
12 March 19, 2012 8:39 pm
Re: Nintendo's original SFC (SNES) development samples...? (34 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Tried to embed a video but I had flashbacks to the last time I tried and I gave up out of frustration....
13 March 18, 2012 11:07 am
Re: Nintendo's original SFC (SNES) development samples...? (34 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Wow, don't think I've ever seen that SNES emulator before. Our SNES development hardware was reverse engineered by our tech guy at the time and as I said in the previous post, we pretty much wrote all of our own tools.
Re: releasing the tools - extremely unlikely. I'd love to but I wouldn't even know where to start looking!
And yes, we definitely reused samples. Making good ones was an art-form and often took a lot of trial and error (optimising sample sizes and loop points etc.) so when you had ones that worked you got as much use out of them as you could
I miss the SNES, it was a great system to use and uniquely it had it's own audio CPU so no CPU sharing with the game code - absolute luxury
14 March 17, 2012 5:06 pm
Re: Nintendo's original SFC (SNES) development samples...? (34 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Actually, as far as I can remember we had no tools at all for SNES audio dev. I wrote all the drivers and conversion tools (sample converters and MIDI utils) for the games I worked on.
The Gamecube (I think) and definitely the N64 had tools supplied by Nintendo (actually, the N64 ones were by Software Creations and, uncharacteristically, they weren't actually very good)
15 March 17, 2012 5:03 pm
Re: Nintendo's original SFC (SNES) development samples...? (34 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
I don't remember such a thing existing...
16 March 12, 2012 11:18 pm
Re: Putting NTRQ & Pulsar & PR8 on a Famicom cart (Guide) (97 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
You, sir, are an utter legend!