On Beeps and Sweeps
Having completed the initial versions for major graphical components in my 8-Bit engine, I turn to the equally important and far more mysterious world of 8-bit audio. This is something of a difficult jump in experience for me. I have relied upon 3rd party tools like FMOD for some time, but it’s time to dig in and get some knowledge of Audio Synthesis. I found a few websites and resources to get me started.
- Wikipedia is always a good place to start. Reading articles on Square, Triangle, Sawtooth, Pulse and other wave forms provide basic concepts.
- Mattias Gustavsson has much love for Retro Games and Consoles, and has some great information on optimized 2D engine techniques. He has started the RetroBox project, for which he has provided source code for his initial version, now available. Audio is not completed yet, but you can read about his Specification for the RetroBox, which does covers his plans for audio.
- Shay Green pointed me to his Blip Buffer project and documentation, which will undoubtedly help me understand synthesis in action. He has created several audio synthesis projects to assist NES, SNES, and other console emulation projects. Definitely check him out.
And while I am absorbing all this information, I have the SNESmusic.org (and winamp plugin) to keep me inspired. Man, they really had some great composers back then. So glad we can still enjoy their great music.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Man, this is great! I hope you keep us updated on where you go with the audio.
March 16th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
I’m slowly gaining knowledge on how to use this stuff. There are many open-source projects on the internet that perform waveform data creation and manipulation. But so far, the examples of code I’ve seen are either very messy without any reusable code, or are organized but tied together with many other systems of which I have no working knowledge, such as console emulators. So, it’s going to take a bit more effort to and probably a fair share of trial and error work. Once accomplished however, the results should be very satisfying. I will certainly post any progress, as it occurs.