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Multimedia Mike
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Good news: I looked into the software library that handles the DS music. It should be pretty straightforward to get channel toggling working there and I will try to include that in a future player version.

It looks like the DS supports 16 channels. I guess I should display the voices in 2 columns of 8.

ooh my god yes oh my god yes oh my god yes oh my yes god my oh god yes god

This. This this this this this

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I posted a new update to the player. This version fixes playback for a bunch of Nintendo DS games. One such problematic game was Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I was eager to hear the original Turnabout Sisters' Theme, on which several great site remixes are based.

Fortunately, updates to the player should be auto-updated.

Channel toggling for Nintendo DS games is coming soon (it works, but comically, the main player never accounted for the fact that a system might have more than 10 channels). :grin:

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Nice. I was disappointed that I was having problems loading some of the DS games.

I have a request for Dreamcast: add Skies of Arcadia, please? It's here with a bunch of other dsf files. If you go back through the site's directories you can find other Dreamcast games that people might like. There's a lot of game music on that guy's site.

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Nice. I was disappointed that I was having problems loading some of the DS games.

I'm still finding bugs with some DS games (Sangokushi DS 2 is still silent). Please report any other DS problems you come across.

I have a request for Dreamcast: add Skies of Arcadia, please? It's here with a bunch of other dsf files. If you go back through the site's directories you can find other Dreamcast games that people might like. There's a lot of game music on that guy's site.

Sure thing. I still need to harvest a bunch of files from that site (all the Genesis material on gamemusic.multimedia.cx came from smd.joshw.info).

I tried to add Skies of Arcadia to my site but I encountered problems. So, boo for that. OTOH, thanks for exposing new bugs in my processes! :grin: I'll try to get Skies working soon.

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Good news! The latest version of the game music player (v1.1.0.0, which should be auto-updated by the time you read this) supports toggling individual voices on Nintendo DS games.

Bad news! It really isn't very useful. :-| So far, all of the DS games I have studied use some kind of MIDI / channel scheduling scheme in which the next note is output on the next channel that happens to be free. Thus, if you disable all but one voice, you will hear a wide variety of instruments, not just, e.g., the rhythm or the bass line.

Still, the feature is there if you want to play around with it.

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Huh, that is odd. There's probably some algorithm that the DS used to optimize it's performance that spread the channels like that. :???:

Still one step closer to full separation than most, though. Awesome. So when push comes to shove, are you going to make this system possibly an embeddable feature, or will people need to be directed toward the site given in order to listen to da chiptunage? I'm pretty happy either way, but I'd be happier with the embeddable player idea, if you're able to go that route...

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Huh, that is odd. There's probably some algorithm that the DS used to optimize it's performance that spread the channels like that. :???:

This was also seen in some SNES games. One that always stands out is Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. Try disabling all but one channel and you'll still hear a diversity of instruments.

Still one step closer to full separation than most, though. Awesome. So when push comes to shove, are you going to make this system possibly an embeddable feature, or will people need to be directed toward the site given in order to listen to da chiptunage? I'm pretty happy either way, but I'd be happier with the embeddable player idea, if you're able to go that route...

I have no reason to keep this all to myself, so I'll be happy to develop some method to make it easily embeddable on other sites. The most likely scenario is that you will point visitors to the Chrome Web Store link for the player. The player commandeers some MIME types (that I invented, so no one will think the player has unjustly hijacked them). As long as you serve a chiptune using the right MIME type, and the embedding web page's JavaScript knows how to talk to the player, it should just work.

Oh, and I also created a few new chiptune container formats for this project. That might complicate matters, but hopefully not by much.

I still need to test it all and write it up. I'm glad there's interest, though.

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This was also seen in some SNES games. One that always stands out is Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. Try disabling all but one channel and you'll still hear a diversity of instruments.

Yeah, that's how some tracks are designed. Perhaps it has something to do with the reverb in the music while the channels are otherwise maxed out? Or it's something else that I don't know, upon first listening? Listening to individual channels teaches you a lot about strategies and techniques that the composers used, especially weird cases like BT:BM.

Listen to the single channels in Silver Surfer and you'll hear all sorts of wankery with instrument shifts (the triangle, in particular, but the rest do this as well), but in that case the reason is that there are not enough channels to make the music otherwise. Pretty damn awesome shit there, too.

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the soundtrack for "Magi-Nation" on Game Boy isn't working for me

Reproduced, and placed on my bug tracker.

this is so addictive

It's so addictive for me to develop it. I meant to take a break from working on it after I released it last week. But that didn't happen, and probably won't happen anytime soon; people keep finding bugs and coming up with more suggestions. :-)

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I posted about this project over on the Minibosses message board, seems a few people took a liking to it. Some have discovered a few issues and offered suggestions, so if you want to check out the thread made in response to my post:

http://theshizz.org/forum/index.php?/topic/38171-httpgamemusicmultimediacxgame-music-appreciation-of-site/

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I posted about this project over on the Minibosses message board, seems a few people took a liking to it. Some have discovered a few issues and offered suggestions, so if you want to check out the thread made in response to my post:

http://theshizz.org/forum/index.php?/topic/38171-httpgamemusicmultimediacxgame-music-appreciation-of-site/

crap you found a post by me there :P

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I posted about this project over on the Minibosses message board, seems a few people took a liking to it. Some have discovered a few issues and offered suggestions, so if you want to check out the thread made in response to my post:

http://theshizz.org/forum/index.php?/topic/38171-httpgamemusicmultimediacxgame-music-appreciation-of-site/

Yep, I found that post last night thanks to referrer logs and made an account already. Thanks for spreading the word.

I'm eager to engage with the community over there. Regrettably, they have not yet approved my account (same manual approval process that is found here on OCRemix forums). I guess I can't fault them thanks to spammers, trolls, and other internet ne'er-do-wells.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I just wanted to bump this thread and let everyone know that I'm still actively working on the game music appreciation website and making improvements: http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/

Most recently:

  • Power user feature: Voice toggling hotkeys: I know voice toggling is a popular feature, and you can now toggle voices with the number keys on your keyboard. Numbers 1-9 and 0 correspond to voices 1-10, respectively (no hotkeys for channels numbered higher than 10, which is only a problem for Nintendo DS chiptunes, but those behave differently anyway).
  • No more 2:30-length sound effects: A lot of chiptunes initially added to the database didn't have play length metadata and were given a default play length of 2m30s. This was especially a problem for Game Boy chiptunes. I overhauled the database with better estimates for these songs.
  • A/V sync is vastly improved on Windows platform. Audio stutter when starting a new track is also solved.
  • Lower CPU usage, especially if the player window is not viewable. Also eliminated glitch when switching back to the player tab.

I've started working with some in the ripping/dumping community for better coverage. The website even hosts a few SNES sets that have not made it to snesmusic.org yet because they don't work with the official SNES player that the site uses. (For the curious, these include: We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, Clayfighter 2, Mickey's Playtown Adventure; let's hear some remixes now! :< )

Sorry the site is still so ugly. After I get all the functionality and songs in there, I'll try to make it pretty. :grin:

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OKay, this is insane. If you can get it working with Javascript, I would love to see if we couldn't port it to desktop. The only option I have for Mac is a tad limited...

I can't quite tell from your post: Does Chrome/Mac work for you and are you able to use the site as it stands? Or are you still using a PPC-based Mac (where this player wouldn't work)? Is the issue that you're just looking for a better native Mac app for playing chiptunes? Because I don't think porting these players to JavaScript would facilitate native desktop apps (unless using something like Adobe AIR).

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I can't quite tell from your post: Does Chrome/Mac work for you and are you able to use the site as it stands?

Yup.

Or are you still using a PPC-based Mac (where this player wouldn't work)?

Nope.

Is the issue that you're just looking for a better native Mac app for playing chiptunes?

Yup.

Because I don't think porting these players to JavaScript would facilitate native desktop apps (unless using something like Adobe AIR).

No, no, what I meant was if that encoding/decoding the chipfiles can be done with Javascript (though I looked in your code and wasn't exactly sure where that was happening), then it shouldn't be difficult to replicate it with Objective-C.

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No, no, what I meant was if that encoding/decoding the chipfiles can be done with Javascript (though I looked in your code and wasn't exactly sure where that was happening), then it shouldn't be difficult to replicate it with Objective-C.

How did you look at the code? Did you view source on the website? Because that's not the code that actually plays the music. You can view the player code on Github. As you can see, it's already C/C++ and could easily be ported to Objective-C. However, it already shares a lot of code with Audio Overload (incorporating AOSDK, in fact).

I assume Audio Overload is the premiere chiptune playing app for the Mac platform. Do you have any specific complaints/suggestions for improvement? I admit I haven't tried it yet, but I plan to soon.

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