NES style Music for BIO FORCE APE?

[Ed Oscuro]

The guy finishing Bio

FORCE

APE

hasn't asked, but I know he might do well to get some NES tunage for the release of the game. He's already coded his own sound routines but they should be quite flexible. If interested he's on #vbender, sister channel on the same network as #shmups, and also on Digital Press, the Retrogaming Roundtable, with a topic here. Somebody help these guys out with musical goodness!

[louisg]

I'd be happy to help, if I can.. do his routines use NSF, or did you just mean nes-like?

[Ed Oscuro]

I'd be happy to help, if I can.. do his routines use NSF, or did you just mean nes-like?

Not NSF - it'll be an actual NES cartridge, without any exotic hardware, I assume. He might be able to use some sheet music if you could get that to 'im.

[louisg]

Hmm ok, you don't know what kind of music engine he's using?

[Udderdude]

I might be able to contribute some tunes, if I'm given some idea as to what to use to make the music with .. possibly something like this ? http://famitracker.shoodot.net/

[ZacharyB]

Kind of off-topic, but louisg/udderdude, I know you guys did the tunes for the XOPs together; how far of a jump from chiptune tracking is MOD tracking?

[Udderdude]

Tim McFarland did almost all of the music for XOP Black, actually.

Making chiptune music with MODs isn't that hard, just limit yourself to 4 channels and only use square/sinewave samples and some noise.

Famitracker seems a bit more complex, though.

[ProgrammingAce]

I'm the programmer in question, so i thought i'd chime in. I've played guitar for half a dozen years or so, but i've never written any music.

I can't say I'm accepting music right now, only because i have no idea what the legal consequences would be later on if the game gets sold.

What I can do, is release the documentation for the sound engine if anybody wants to play around with it. Once the project is done, i might be talked into releasing the engine by itself as a method to generate music on an NES cart. If anybody actually cares about stuff like that, anyway...

Here's the documentation: http://programmingace.com/images/BioFor ... esmus.html

And the input file that created the music that's currently in the demo rom: http://programmingace.com/images/BioForceApe/tomley.mus

[Udderdude]

Have you got any way to test or play these .mus files? Composing blindfolded is a bit of a pain.

Also, I don't exactly feel like learning this custom format and writing music for it, only to find that it's not even going to be used.

[ProgrammingAce]

Yeah, i really wouldn't expect anyone to go through all of the trouble for something i'm not sure if i can use, but i do appreciate the offer.

Right now, the only working version of the sound engine is embedded inside the game itself. Since it's written in assembly, the only to change the music is to recompile the entire game.

If anyone has any interest in the sound engine for their own projects, i could rather easily split it off as its own project and release the source code but not until after i'm finished with the actual game.

[null1024]

From the documentation, the syntax looks like a miniature version of MML...