"Pulsar" demo (Page 11) - Nintendo Consoles - Forums

161 Aug 30, 2010 3:40 pm

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WOW MAN!

herr_prof wrote:

I see this as more of a real time performance tracker than a tracker someone would want to use for game or demo development...

Sort of true, I guess. You'd definitely be hard pressed to do any sort of demo or game with the music taking about 4/5ths of the CPU time

But NSF export is a definite possibility. LIke I said earlier, there's no technical reason it can't be done as the format support higher-than-60hz refresh rates.

The bigger hurdle, I think, is somehow managing 32kb of music data in ROM. Though having said that, I'm going to have to split up the data into banks anyway as you can only access 8kb of SRAM at a time, even with a 32kb SRAM configuration.

162 Aug 30, 2010 3:46 pm

herr_prof

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Lsdj also has a java management tool.. basically allows you to mix and match save files from lsdj projects into other ones, so it helps when you are creating a rom cart for live usage from a collection of multiple songs.

I was thinking of just being able to run a conversion tool to put 8kb save data into the 32kb version when it became available.

163 Aug 30, 2010 6:47 pm

neilbaldwin

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WOW MAN!

I guess that would be quite useful.

I know next to nothing about java though

164 Aug 31, 2010 6:22 am

EBOT

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venezuela ccs

woooo..

Songs : 1
Steps per Song : 40 (hex)

----
eliminating objects you gain more space? although I believe that it is needed much more inevitably...

165 Aug 31, 2010 7:57 am

neilbaldwin

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WOW MAN!

EBOT wrote:

woooo..
Songs : 1
Steps per Song : 40 (hex)
----
eliminating objects you gain more space? although I believe that it is needed much more inevitably...

Pretty much all of the allocated space for (and the number of) objects is designed to be scalable.

It's pretty straightforward to, say, double the number of steps per song, but that extra 140 (hex) bytes has to come from somewhere - what would you sacrafice? Given that each Song step can contain one Chain that can contain 16 Patterns, a Song, even with the 8kb save file model, is 40 x 10 (hex) Patterns long. I know it's not ideal but it's usable. I think the number of Patterns and Tables is the more critical aspect but that's just my point-of-view.

It's all a juggling act at the moment and fairly arbitrary as 8kb is (hopefully) only a temporary memory model.

166 Aug 31, 2010 10:14 pm

jbuonacc

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Rochester, NY

a non-forwards compatible 8k version that works on the PowerPak would be just fine for me (at least to start).

let me know if you need any beta testers. :wink: i tried to help out more with NTRQ when it was released, but got busy with other things. Pulsar could give me a good reason to fire up the ol' NES.

167 Sep 11, 2010 9:41 pm

neilbaldwin

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WOW MAN!

Quick update (mainly just so you know I'm still alive ) Nio video this time, a new one is coming soon though

http://blog.ntrq.net/?p=353

168 Sep 11, 2010 11:18 pm

jefftheworld

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Toronto, Ontario, Canada

New table stuff + Multi FX = GOLD!

I can't wait for a publicly released beta build!

(Or even a semi-private alpha that I could test for you, wink wink, nudge nudge, saynomore saynomore)

169 Sep 12, 2010 4:29 pm

neilbaldwin

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WOW MAN!

Soon jeff, soon....

In the meantime, video(s) as promised.

http://blog.ntrq.net/?p=357

170 Sep 12, 2010 4:57 pm

infradead

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Tacoma WA

makes plans to break in steal the software and sell it to North Korea

171 Sep 13, 2010 2:15 pm

wedanced

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San Francisco

FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUCK. THIS IS EPIC NEIL!!!!!!!!! this is looking soooooo goooD!! i am pretty sure i have just heard sounds that i didnt think were possible on the nes.

172 Sep 13, 2010 6:03 pm

neilbaldwin

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WOW MAN!

I've been trying to work out a reasonable memory map for the 32KB version. It needs planning carefully because of the requirement on NES to bank-switch the SRAM in 8KB blocks (i.e. the whole of SRAM is not visible at all times).

Here's my best effort so far. I've purposefully tried to leave one 8KB bank free as at some point I'd like to use that SRAM for compressing Songs so that you could have more than one in a .sav file. This is the reason there's such a big chunk of the map which is unused.

Anyway, have a look at the numbers and see if you'd change anything about the distribution. Ideally I'd like more Tables but they do consume a lot of space. The middle column shows the object count, the end column how much SRAM that many of those object takes up.

173 Sep 13, 2010 6:08 pm

neilbaldwin

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WOW MAN!

Oh, I should point out a few things;

"Duty" is duty tables, 16 steps in each one
"Speed" is like Grooves in LSDJ, 16 steps in each one.
"Envelopes", "Vibrato" and "Echo" specifies the number of "patch objects" for those categories. For example, an Envelope patch object has 4 parameters, Attack, Sustain, Decay and Release (so 4 bytes).

I think the rest is fairly obvious.