Albums on cartridges. Running all of the music on the actual hardware.
I've been pretty interested in this for a while, and was thinking about doing one as a small project to give to friends/relatives.
I know this has been done a couple times before, but I haven't been able to find a lot of documentation on the subject.
Is there an easy way to go about doing this, are there tools to help stick sng/MML/whatever else into a rom, or would you need to learn to program everything from scratch?
If I would need to start programming everything from scratch, where would I want to go to learn how to? (I don't have a lot of coding experience, I used to dabble in java and ruby, but it's been a couple years since. likely gonna need beginner-level help)
Most of what I've found lately is incredibly out of date, linking to programs with expired downloads or sites that have been taken down altogether.
What I'd like to do eventually (if possible) is a rom that runs a bit like the sound test of Kirby's Dreamland, with a small short animation looping in the corner, and a simple track selector.
Help, please?
I'm guessing you're talking about making Gameboy ROMs, and from my (very very very) basic knowledge about Gameboy programming, you'll have to learn to code in C. This site seems to cover only the very basics, but it links to other sites that have more in-depth tutorials and information.
Handheld Heroes did a ROM album thingy not long ago, and it was coded by nitro2k01. You should try talking to him about this stuff.
Nitro is the fucking man. He knows his shit for real. Ultramega knows what's up, too.
Any album that includes the save file would technically count...
Any album that includes the save file would technically count...
Nah, not really. It needs to be plug in cartridge, press play. You could just send a cartridge with LSDj and your song on it, but then people could just delete the song. Not the same thing, you know.
Links to get you going in the right direction
MML engine: http://jiggawatt.org/muzak/xpmck/
Assembler: http://www.villehelin.com/wla.html
IRC: #gbdev on EFNet for general Gameboy programming help:
danimal cannon wrote:Any album that includes the save file would technically count...
Nah, not really. It needs to be plug in cartridge, press play. You could just send a cartridge with LSDj and your song on it, but then people could just delete the song. Not the same thing, you know.
plug in cartridge, press start...
changing songs, well that's not as intuitive.
nitro2k01 wrote:Nah, not really. It needs to be plug in cartridge, press play. You could just send a cartridge with LSDj and your song on it, but then people could just delete the song. Not the same thing, you know.
plug in cartridge, press start...
changing songs, well that's not as intuitive.
But he means not in an lsdj way...like, a music disk is what he wants. A music disk for a gameboy
from what i understand there is no easy way to do this for LSDJ ~ you may have to reverse engineer the LSDJ player or something. for something like music box or carillon tracker there may be ways to do it, and for MML i suppose you can definitely do it. for other system like vortex tracker 2 or pretty much any c64 software (mssiah, prophet64 and cynthcart not included), it is really easy to get a player you can use in your own programs
There are a couple of Gameboy demo's right? Maybe you should hook up with those guys and try if you can do a musicdisk or something.
Concerning other platforms, I know there's a working snd -> prg converter for the Atari ST. That would let you convert your songs to working programs you can put on diskette. But you'd have to make some Atari songs first. 
i think nerdolf he told me he used carillon tracker for the snorpung demos
i THINK
i think nerdolf he told me he used carillon tracker for the snorpung demos
yeah thats correct, and carillion can be downloaded here : http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=17337
carillion editor comes with carillion player which is a routine in ASM to play the songs you made with the editor.
this can't be done with LSDJ in the way you probably want because the way LSDJ is designed, it takes up most of the processing power of the gameboy just playing the music. That's why Nitro's handheld heroes demo shows a LSDJ editing screen while playing the song, the editing functions are removed but theres no more room for demo style grahpics or animations...
if you made your songs in carillion with the intention of using the player routine, you'd still have to code your own menu to navigate between songs..
danimal cannon wrote:plug in cartridge, press start...
changing songs, well that's not as intuitive.
But he means not in an lsdj way...like, a music disk is what he wants. A music disk for a gameboy
I know I'm just being a cock
I've been researching something like this long enough to know that it will take me a good while to ever do it as well as I would like to.
As for examples, MorphCat released an NES music disc called Turquoise Palace.
Apparently preceding that was VegaVox by Alex Mauer and NO CARRIER, and NO CARRIER later released an open source version of that framework called VegaPlay.
So, this has been done on the NES a few times and could be done again without too much trouble.
As for Game Boy, I'm not aware of a Game Boy music disc having been made before.
Some trackers, like Carillon and DefleMask, have tools to compile a ROM that plays a single song. In theory, one could patch custom graphics into one of those ROMs to make a PROM cart single without being a proficient ASM programmer.
as Telerophon stated, VegaPlay is sufficient for putting a Famitracker-tracked album into a cart, it uses NROM which is an easy cart to reproduce. I've built a few carts using VegaPlay as a base. My Nyan Cat NES demo actually used VegaPlay as it's code base, though i've stripped out most of the original code and placed in my own graphics routines.
Last edited by derekb (Aug 28, 2012 4:32 pm)
I would pay to produce many carts with my new album on it haha, that would be freaking sick.