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No, because the idea occured to me, that not only arbitrary waves could be made, but a lot of things where the instant level changes happen in IRQ and the rest is automatic. That way you can minimize the CPU usage because it's the automatic playback in-between IRQs, but at some point with complex wa...

Yeah I figured NMIs would be a no-no but also the OAM DMA... which I guess would still be a problem even if you choose lower pitches + increase the sample length (but it also detunes you to a B scale) I threw these together in a couple minutes, and I was too lazy to add a controller reading routine ...

I've been listening to a lot of POKEY music and a lot of songs manipulate the channel volume at different rates to produce a 4-bit wavetable channel. And I'm curious, is it possible to do something like this with the NES? Just a single channel with <=64 samples per wavetable. (the bit depth could ei...

Well, if you want to get pedantic about it, no, none of those need to be always banked-in. They could all go in RAM, for example. :P Yeah I thought that would enable a huge amount of usable DPCM samples for games, it just needs extra ram and a mapper capable of switching in the $C000-$FFFF range. I...

So it's been a while, and things are going pretty well, I'm slowly getting my game loop system in order, but the thing is, I'm already quite "scared" of running out of resources, especially that whenever I have routines that at some point, do bankswitching (to call a sound effect or something), I ha...

I think 3 is the easiest because the castle is a joke... The stages are short, they give you tons of E-tanks, and not even the Yellow Devil is threatening because the pieces move slower than they did in MM1, and you also have a sliding ability so you only need to jump when a piece comes at you at th...

So I've been thinking, and for a cutscene I will probably want to show a scrolling background (just with the two nametables repeating over and over again) and show text at the same time, so I'd have to split the screen with a sprite 0 hit. But when do I need to do that? I read that accessing $2000 d...

BossSQ1_00_Inst: .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 .db SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0,SQInstrument0 BossSQ1_00_Len_Lo: .db $06,$07,$06,$07 .db...

By the way, if you are struggling with DPCM samples and the space loss they cause in the fixed bank, you can also try playing your code as a sound! Most of the time it's just random garbage (but you can still use it as a looped wind sound so your noise channel is free to do something else) but I fou...

You're on the right track but by having looked at your plans, I can't help advising you to find some other way of representing your note effects because this produces TONS of redundant data, for example you are storing the current instrument for every single note. Instead, you should keep a variable...

I think I'm going to make the sound engine next. How difficult would it be to implement "instruments" that have pre-defined volume and pitch envelopes? I think that would save some space over writing the envelopes in the song data. There are really only two options that come to my mind: 1. Implemen...

Ok I've been making my new system functions quite confidently. But now that I'm getting around to designig my metatile sytem for the background I need to ask this: What are the pros and cons of different data formats, having hard coded collison maps vs. Generated ones in RAM. Also what kinds of data...

I have read around, now that I've also got the controller working, and can fill CHR-RAM at a tile-level, I've asked my friend who could put together carts for me if this actually becomes a thing... and apparently I could have 256k EPROMs available, I'm not sure though if the UNROM donors natively su...

Thanks, I got it to work and at least I made a (for the time being, not very tidy) sprite 0 hit loop to wait for the end of the prerender line in and then for the sprite 0 hit, since I don't need any kind of screen split. It looks fairly consistent, but every so often a huge peak occurs, it's good t...

Thank you, so now I understand how this works. Simply the name was very misleading to me because it made me assume that this RAM being mentioned is something on the cart and not the PPU pattern RAM $0000-$1FFF. I assume it's very easy to make the faux background parallax scrolling by ROL-ing or ROR-...