I don't know what LogoNES is but in memory there is 960 bytes of the nametable (32 x 30 set of tiles to use) followed by 64 bytes of attribute (palette to use for each 2x2 tile region, 4 to a byte). If using shiru's tool make sure that you "save nametable and attributes", which should save the whole thing together as a 1kb block of data.

50

(1 replies, posted in Collaborations)

I did Kathy's Waltz a little while ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KF5qZORAAU

Anyone else a fan of this album? I'd love to see a full 2A03 tribute of Time Out with each track by a different person. There are 6 tracks left..

1. Blue Rondo A La Turk
2. Strange Meadow Lark
3. Take Five
4. Three to Get Ready
5. Kathy's Waltz (done)
6. Everybody's Jumpin'
7. Pick Up Sticks

I'd hope to keep it 2A03 only, so that it'd be possible to build an NES ROM / cartridge when the project is complete.

Anyone interested?

51

(14 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

The FIR has 8 taps. It's enough to make a weak lowpass filter, which is fine for an echo/reverb sound. Useless if you're trying to do big filter sweeps or something like that (it just doesn't have much bandwidth to work with).

If you want to imitate an SNES echo, a regular delay unit with a small amount of lowpass is a pretty decent approximation. That should be close enough for its usual uses.

52

(14 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

It's a really, really small FIR filter though. Not that powerful as a filter, but decent enough as a delay unit.

53

(10 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

Famitracker does have MIDI support, though it can't do a whole lot, just good for entering notes on one channel.

After everything that's been said about it, I wouldn't risk anything on MIDINES, personally.

I've been considering routing MIDI to my NES via the USB CopyNES I have installed, but I still have other projects on my plate, so I don't know if I'll ever get around to that.

54

(16 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

If it helps, I wrote a quick/dirty python program to generate an nsfplug playlist directly from list.html: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/883356/famicompo_playlist.py

Generated:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/883356/famicom … ginals.m3u
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/883356/famicompo9_covers.m3u

There was a bug in entry 39 preventing it from playing properly in NSFPlay/NSFPlug but the rest are just fine. I even patched entry 39 so that it can play in NSFPlay as well: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/883356/Entry39 … atched.nsf

Using NSFPlug 2.2 and Winamp's Diskwriter feature, making the playlist and dumping a set of MP3s can be almost completely automated, and can be done in a relatively short amount of time. It's easy to edit the playlists by hand if you want to tweak the times, though I'm not sure why you want to reinterpret the times; why not listen to it for the length the submitter specified? In this Famicompo I think there were only 3 troll tracks which had times longer than their actual content (i.e. Hypnotoad, Kiss Me, Sandstorm), and it's pretty easy to just skip it if you don't want to listen to it anyway...


What track had extra stuff after the end of the specified time?

55

(16 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

I thought you weren't going to listen to the covers B00daW.

56

(50 replies, posted in Sega)

Shinobi III Shinobi III Shinobi III

57

(63 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

The real challenge is probably getting 100 other players on the server to begin with. tongue

Though if you were to develop an NES MMO for the ENIO, I suppose it would be prudent to add ENIO emulation to an emulator and let people play that way. That'd make it easier to develop for, and expand your potential user base a lot.

58

(16 replies, posted in Sega)

I had the hang on + safari hunt SMS, and it also did the snail game. It actually explained in the manual how to get to the game.

59

(63 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

Well, yeah you can synchronize timing easly, you have NMI and other stuff, but there's really very little way to get information over to the other PPU-- it would have to be rendering mostly independently of what was going on in your NES. Any relevant information would have to be sent over the CPU bus serially I guess.

60

(63 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

What do you mean use a slave PPU? There aren't really any pins that would let the expansion port read from CHR, or even know what address the CPU is writing to...

61

(28 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

There have been some pretty good attempts, like Blargg's libraries: http://slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html

Though, the other side of it is that this blurriness, bleeding, color bursting, etc. can be considered an undesired artifact, the same as background noise/buzz or the strong lowpass from RF demodulation that you get on the audio side of things. The image in memory is represented as discrete blocks, and the original design of NES sprites and tiles would in many cases have been done with enlarged pixels on a computer monitor. Pixels are a clear and accurate way to display the data that's in there. Furthermore, nice clean pixels are just aesthetically pleasing to a lot of people. I don't think it's really unjustified to prefer the look of pixels.

I used to draw pixel versions of mario sprites on graph paper when I was a kid; even though the TV's image was fuzzy, I still could make out the pixels and thought of them as pixels, possibly because I had an Atari ST and was used to the idea of pixels already. I would have loved to play games then as they look now.

The NES' video output was never very clean, it was only good enough to resolve the picture adequately, but with the SNES it got a bit cleaner, and nowadays you can get very clean composite output from a PS3 or Wii. On a modern HD TV you can really see the pixels very well (try Mega Man 9 on a PS3, for example). I'm actually very happy that modern emulation has freed us from the very poor signal quality we used to have.

62

(28 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

On an old CRT television maybe. On some computer monitors they've been very sharp for as long as NES has been around though.

It may be true that the NES never had flat square pixels at that time because it was played on TVs, but there were other computer systems that have very nice sharp pixels in the same era.

63

(6 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

If all you want is an NSF playing cartridge for a famicom, why not get a PowerPak and 72 to 60 pin converter? I do this and it works just fine.

If you want something that does expansion audio from a second cart, there's the TNS-HFC3, which is still available so far as I know.

64

(1 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

NSFPlay 2.2 has been released! Get it here:

http://nsfplay.googlecode.com/files/nsfplay22.zip

The most significant update is NSFe support, but there's a bunch of other minor changes.

NSFPlay 2.2 - 8/31/2012
Audio Emulation:
- Unmute on reset now sets $4015 to $0F instead of $1F.
- PAL noise frequency $1 now 8 instead of incorrectly 7.
- New VRC7 patch set, option to select alternative patch sets via VRC7_PATCH.
- 5B polarity inverted, envelope adjusted, volume tweak.
- MMC5 polarity inverted, length counter runs at double speed, highest 8 frequencies are not muted.
- VRC6 $9003 register implemented (controls halt and frequency multiplier)
- VRC6 polarity inverted, phase reset now functions properly.
- FDS now uses NSF header $76/$77 to set up $6000-7FFF memory range.
- FDS $4087 bit 7 now mutes modulator.
- Enable periodic noise option fixed. (Forced perodic noise by accident.)
Other:
- Fixed improper $4015 read implementation (should return length counter status), also DPCM IRQ was not initialized.
- Default focus in keyboard window now the track list (to prevent accidental mouse scroll time expansion).
- Fixed Winamp visualizer timing inaccuracy, changed default keyboard delay/freq.
- Inverted VRC7 volume display in keyboard view.
- NSFe support.
- Added NSFe extension block 'text', contains null terminated string of any length (NSF text).
- Removed broken ENABLE_DCF config option. HPF=256 now correctly disables HPF.
- Rewrote LPF and HPF, should have a more usable range of options now.
- Removed XXX_FR/XXX_FC options, now XXX_FILTER works like LPF for each device.
- Memory R/W access is now exclusive to the first device that accepts it; prevents FDS multi-expansion write conflicts.
- Title string will automatically remove whitespace at its beginning or end.
- Fixed single instance bug, was failing to open new NSF file when chosen from explorer.
- Fixed conflicts between keyboard commands and other dialogs.
- Removed tag menu from info page. Does not appear to apply to NSFs.
- Fixed incorrect PAL pitch when QUALITY=0.

NSFPlay 2.1 - 3/27/2012
Audio Output:
- Fixed race condition in audio buffering; stand alone NSFPlay would occasionally get stuck stuttering.
- Produces stereo output, channel mixer dialog for panning and per-channel volume control.
- Fixed PCM playback speed; CPU execution was counting requested clocks, not clocks executed.
- Fixed accuracy of seek times.
- Loop detection now accounts for all audio registers, not just a subset of 2A03 and N163.
- N163 wavelength is actually 6-bit, not 3. Now allows sample length up to 256.
- Fixed FDS volume/sweep envelope caps. (Direct register writes can make them louder.)
- Fixed FDS modulation bias calculation and wrapping.
- Set default volume for VRC7 and FDS a little lower (to match expected levels).
- MMC5 PCM support (for both read and write mode).
- Added phase reset option to MMC5.
- MMC5 was missing length counter and audio register reads; rewrote to conform with APU.
- Adjusted phases for APU/MMC5 square channels to match NesDev's description.
- APU/DMC/MMC5 rewrite of envelope/length/sweep behaviour to use a frame sequencer instead of independent timers.
Options:
- Option to randomize noise on reset (on by default).
- Options cleanup, removed unused/deprecated options from .ini file.
- Using global LPF by default instead of on each device (saves CPU, same result).
- Keyboard view channel colour is now customizable in .ini file (CHANNEL_XX_COL).
Keyboard view:
- Fixed crash due to keyboard OnTimer being allowed before Reset() is executed by the PlayThread.
- Double buffering keyboard view to remove flicker.
- Different colours for different expansions in keyboard view.
- Fixed sound lag after seek.
- FME-7 now named 5B, N106 now named N163.
- DPCM now named DMC in keyboard view.
- Fixed 5B volume display (E now correctly indicates envelope, volume is now correct value).
- 5B now displays envelope and noise.
- VRC6 saw volume now displays accumulator register.
- Corrected VRC6 saw pitch in keyboard view.
- Fixed trailing lines on N163 waveform display.
- DMC volume display no longer flipped (is now $4011 register value).
- DMC now shows sample frequency rather than byte frequency.
- Triangle and noise were not showing muting due to length counter of 0.
- Noise now has frequency display (either rate of random samples, or tonal frequency for periodic noise).
- Removed feature that extends the life of key dots beyond the frame the channel is active (frequency can change when key is silent, esp. VRC6 squares, which visibly jump to the wrong pitch)
Other:
- Save WAV button on NSFPlay.
- Command line WAV output for batch processing.
- Added extra NSF header information to "misc" text box, initial banks, load/init/play addresses, etc.
- Fixed thread-safety issue for configuration (was accessed liberally from many threads).
- Removed legacy code for windows versions older than XP.

NSFPlay 2.0 - 2/22/2012
- Restructured sln/vcproj files, and rebuilt for VS9.
- All intermediate files go into common Debug/Release directories.
- Renamed wa2nsf project to in_yansf to match name of the plugin.
- Fixed improperly set WAVEFORMATEX header in libemuwa2 (allows execution on windows Vista/7).
- Corrected pitch of noise channel.
- Updated VRC7 default patch set.
- Added PAL support and pal flags indicator (PREFER_PAL=1 to prefer PAL for dual mode).
- Added about box for determining build version.
- Fixed some menu items in English dialogs.
- Fixed some initial config settings.
- Fixed crash when using playlist menu options with no loaded NSF.

NSFPlay - 12/09/2006
- Written by Brezza > http://www.pokipoki.org/dsa/index.php?NSFplay


Project homepage: http://rainwarrior.ca/projects/nsfplay/