nesdev.com

So long as you don't use any channel 3 waveform other than FEDCBA98765432100123456789ABCDEF, and you don't get fancy with short-period noise, a Game Boy should sound enough like an NES to qualify.

Sorry for the late reply.

As tepples pointed out, Game Boy is similar enough to Famicom audio for freestyle. I think that some voters would take off points but the restriction is anything that clearly sounds like Famicom + anything else you want.

The program you list by recommended player is Windows program, and some people use Linux (such as myself) or Macintosh computer, too.

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If you use GNU/Linux (as I do), then any player based on Blargg's Game_Music_Emu, such as the SDL-based player included with GME's source code distribution, will work. I've made a wrapper for GME and DUMB that'll convert formats they support to a WAV file that'll play in just about anything. It renders NSF, for example, at 1 minute per second on an Atom N450. If you want, I can post its source code.

Game_Music_Emu doesn't support the MMC5, FDS or VRC7 expansion audio chips or the 5B noise or envelope channels. FCEUX (and by extension Mednafen) doesn't support alternative PLAY rates or the 5B noise/envelope. Nestopia doesn't support NSFs at all. Which means the last two editions of Famicompo contain entries that will not play correctly on any Linux emulator I'm aware of.

<plug>Except my own, which is neither stable nor open-source, but if that doesn't deter you you can find it in this thread. I just noticed it's had 37 downloads in the last 6 months so I should get a move on and update it.</plug>

Assuming your Linux computer has either an x86 processor or an x86-64 processor, as opposed to the ARM processor in a Raspberry Pi, how well do they play in an NSF player for Windows in Wine in Linux?

Who maintains Game_Music_Emu in 2017? I should try uploading some MCVEs of NSFs that don't play to its issue tracker.

It works, but Wine's audio handling is awful. Dropouts, noise and lag are the order of the day. YMMV of course.

Lag yes, dropouts no. FamiTracker 0.4.6 with the buffer length cranked up to 80 ms is usable even on my Atom potatobook. I imagine that for playing an NSF (as opposed to composing), lag would be even less of an issue.

Not all programs have buffer size options, sadly. Famitracker and NSFplay more or less work, but they still click/stutter slightly every second or two, and there's a faint hiss that doesn't show up when I dump to WAV and play with a native app.

.... cheap sample rate conversion? maybe pulseaudio?

Nestopia supports NSFs. The Undead Edition has more accurate sound (from what I know). The Linux versions are supposed to work. Do you mean the given entries won't play?

Whatever it was, it's gone. I have no idea what I changed or when, but right now the Windows version of repeat sounds identical to the Linux version, occasional crackle notwithstanding.


Loading an NSF file in the Linux version of Nestopia produces a blank window and no sound. Nestopia UE 1.46.2, from the i386 Debian Jessie repository.

I find this commonly a problem when a program outputs at 44100 Hz instead of 48000, and the OS/driver does a poor conversion job in the background.

Nowadays, in kode54's fork, I'm seeing files with names like "Nes_Fds_Apu.h" and "Nes_Mmc5_Apu.h" and "Nes_Vrc7_Apu.cpp". I haven't been able to verify their accuracy for myself, nor whether the GME in Debian's and Ubuntu's repository includes them.

Or worse, the hardware itself claiming it supports 44100 natively. But that should have affected everything, not just Wine - there was an audible difference between the two otherwise identical versions of my NSF player.

Anyway, it's working now.


Since I know you like data points: the version of Audacious in the Debian Jessie i386 repository credits Game_Music_Emu 0.52 by Shay Green and William Pitcock in its plugin list, and demonstrates the deficiencies I mentioned above. No website is given.

It doesn't depend on the libgme0 package, which is marked as version 0.5.5 and appears to be based on the fork by Michael Pyne that can be found at https://bitbucket.org/mpyne/game-music-emu/wiki/Home.