I've been trying to wrap my head around the SNES APU stuff...and I found out that most Nintendo games used the same music engine "N-SPC". I was wondering if anyone has written any tools for writing songs for that music engine? Or really ANY tool for writing SNES songs.
I see tools for making BRR samples. I just kinda don't want to write my own SNES music code. Just the song data.
SNES NSPC question
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SNES NSPC question
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
Re: SNES NSPC question
The only existing tool I know of is "SNES GSS". It seems to do the job, though I have yet to learn how to do anything practical with it.
Re: SNES NSPC question
There's also SNESMod, which is kinda the industry standard right now, but as I understand it it's more for chiptunes than games, and it's a pain because it's just a converter and doesn't do hardware simulation for playback. Thus if you want to use a native SPC effect, you have to just use the tracker command SNESMod assigns to it and hope it sounds right after conversion.
A couple of WYHIWYG trackers (besides SNESGSS) are in the works, but I haven't heard much in a while. KungFuFurby is apparently working on a custom engine with a lot of cool features, but I don't know if it will involve tools or if he just prefers to sit down and knock out a track in hex (after whipping up some BRR samples the same way)...
Oh yeah - AddMusicK (well, any variant of AddMusic) seems to target the SMW engine specifically, but with enhancements. There's been a fair amount of work done with that.
A couple of WYHIWYG trackers (besides SNESGSS) are in the works, but I haven't heard much in a while. KungFuFurby is apparently working on a custom engine with a lot of cool features, but I don't know if it will involve tools or if he just prefers to sit down and knock out a track in hex (after whipping up some BRR samples the same way)...
Oh yeah - AddMusicK (well, any variant of AddMusic) seems to target the SMW engine specifically, but with enhancements. There's been a fair amount of work done with that.
Re: SNES NSPC question
Thanks guys. I'll give them a try.
It's amazing how many pages of documents I've had to read to be able to do ALMOST NOTHING with the SNES. But, I will persist.
It's amazing how many pages of documents I've had to read to be able to do ALMOST NOTHING with the SNES. But, I will persist.
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
Re: SNES NSPC question
I should note that there seems to be more than one version of SNESMod floating around. KungFuFurby and Augustus Blackheart have been adding features:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13072
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13072
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Re: SNES NSPC question
Addmusic is the one that's closest to creating N-SPC material.93143 wrote:There's also SNESMod, which is kinda the industry standard right now, but as I understand it it's more for chiptunes than games, and it's a pain because it's just a converter and doesn't do hardware simulation for playback. Thus if you want to use a native SPC effect, you have to just use the tracker command SNESMod assigns to it and hope it sounds right after conversion.
A couple of WYHIWYG trackers (besides SNESGSS) are in the works, but I haven't heard much in a while. KungFuFurby is apparently working on a custom engine with a lot of cool features, but I don't know if it will involve tools or if he just prefers to sit down and knock out a track in hex (after whipping up some BRR samples the same way)...
Oh yeah - AddMusicK (well, any variant of AddMusic) seems to target the SMW engine specifically, but with enhancements. There's been a fair amount of work done with that.
My engine is delayed due to college work. I've got lots of concepts, just don't have the proper time to do so. Not to mention I never tested the thing even though it compiles... although I'll have to redo it anyways because of my misunderstanding with PCALL opcodes.
I have a few ideas for making converters that will go to this format so that I don't have to code everything in hex, but with no functional engine, then I can't make the converters. Plus, I'm increasingly curious about bass (although I want the original Z80-like syntax rather than the 65816-style syntax... yes, I saw some similarities in SPC700 assembly syntax to the Z80), although I'll have to compile it first (if possible).
I've also done some reverse-engineering of other sound engines, although I don't intend on making custom music for them. In one case, I reverse-engineered the sound engine because I wanted to pull off a feat thought impossible: playing back music from Paperboy 2 on the SPC700. I'm using the original sound engine, and I have already determined that I can in theory pull it off because memory constraints are not a problem (No conversions from original format are needed... not even extra commands for compression!). You can find my WIP SPC files here.