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To join in on the audio discussion part, I mostly agree that a lot of soundtracks sound same-ey. Especially when it comes to percussion, since the "lazy way" was to use the available noise pitches, of which there are only three, the fourth setting takes the divider from the third square channel. Cha...

I too have been ignorant of this information until now, but one question remains for me about 1D. It's nice to have it affected by the emphasis bits, but is it "safe" on TVs when not all three bits are set at once?

This forum is not really geared towards ROM hacking, but you might find this useful.

I was wondering about music - I've seen PCM demos for the NES but I'd (probably) need another FX2LP to stream data in and out of the CPU bus. If you want to keep the NES unmodded, try to drive the IRQ line with your external hardware and put the pre-mixed sample for the DAC on a memory-mapped I/O p...

Yesterday as I was trying to figure out a way to efficiently create multiple "forks" of the same enemies that would behave differently based on their ID, I've come across the need to pass one of multiple sets of arguments to my function that handles sine-wave motion. Since the enemy needs to find it...

Even if the NMI handler allows IRQs to get through, distortion from OAM DMA is still very hard, if not impossible to mitigate completely. Only the DMC DMA can interrupt it, so I suppose one solution is to find a good "interpolation" DMC sample to play before starting OAM DMA, or to adjust the sample...

My two cents' worth is that you don't need to run the ENTIRE sound engine multiple time per frame to achieve interesting effects, just put some subroutines in an IRQ that modulate pitch, duty cycle or volume. Also, referring to tips about using the DMC IRQ: If you don't want to use samples otherwise...

Controller reads in NMI seemed like a natural thing for me to do. Since I use the DMC interrupt for scroll splits, there is no reason to have the DMC run during VBlank, so I'm free to stop it, read the controller in NMI in a consistent number of cycles this way (no need for DMC glitch fix) and resta...

Some time ago I proposed the idea of polling the noise channel's length counter state bit in $4015 to wait for approximately half of the visible scalines to be drawn (depends on the timing difference between the CPU and the APU frame sequencer). It's not the most useful thing in the world and I neve...

This is some great news! If this technique is demonstrated to produce those results, I might just have to go back and re-write my IRQ handler. For now, I could get away with the 2-3 scanlines of jitter (somehow I could only get this work with rate $C) by designing my graphics such that solid colors ...

I think if you write to $4003/$4007 the phase will reset, so doing this "constantly" will ensure a DC output, leading to the effect you want. I'm not sure of the phase, either duty cycles %00, %01, %10 will work and %11 won't work, or it's the oposite. This is actually the only difference between d...

Hi there, I've had yet another idea to cram more into my DMC IRQ-based PCM music player, since a scheduler meant to handle game logic tasks during a wait inside the IRQ handler proved to be of very little added efficiency to a game. Since I need to wait more than 100 cycles / IRQ, I thought I could ...

I can agree that UxROM is very attactive to jump to after messing around with NROM. If you look at it, some of the early "great games" of the system used it like Castlevania or Mega Man. It's much easier to get into at first, since you don't have to worry about any kind of volatile trampoline routin...

If you want easy rectangular hitboxes, try to limit the fastest speed anything can go at to be less than the smallest length of any hitbox's side. Otherwise, like mentioned before, objects may pass through other objects if they go too fast (in one frame the object is to the left of something, and in...

Something that always gets on my nerves is when people see raster effects on the SNES, they think it's either "mode 7" or the "FX chip". There seems to be this false myth out there that "the SNES can't do anything special without outside help", but then again, I think the opposite is also true wher...