Lovely beautiful polyphony! Since we're now talking about extending the capabilities of FamiTracker well beyond "traditional" chip music, I propose the following:
Being that part of the beauty of creating music in this way is exploring limitations, and enabling the use of multiple expansion chips effectively reduces those limitations significantly, there should be a limit on how many expansion chips are available at one time.
I fully support the idea of enabling multiple expansion chips at once (finally we can compete with those PPMCK people). Let me say that up front.
What if there are 4 or 5 "slots" in FamiTracker that can be enabled with any combination of sound chips one chooses? The first slot would always, by default, be the base 2A03 chip, but, for instance, I could add to that VRC6 in slot 2, another VRC6 in slot 3, and MMC5 in slot 4.
Would such a thing render useless any music created in the tracker by making it incompatible with the current NSF format? I imagine having multiple "copies" of any given chip is a no-no in the NSF format.
I would be willing to give up NSF compatibility to be able to track multiple 2A03's, VRC6's etc simultaneously.
If you've heard my tune "Chipiphany", you know what can be achieved with two of each module. I tracked each "set" of 2A03+VRC6 separately, working from memory as to what was supposed to fit where. A real pain in the arse, honestly...but there was no other way to get the sound I was looking for!
I guess all these possibilities have got me thinking too much...
Would that not be amazing?
Oh, and also, make the whole program stereo-capable, with fx-controllable panning!
This is starting to sound not like FamiTracker, but like, an 8-bit chip emulator version of SunVox! (Except actually easy to use)
:D :P
jsr, you have made the best tracker in the world. What's wrong with widening its scope beyond the capabilities of the original hardware?
Being that part of the beauty of creating music in this way is exploring limitations, and enabling the use of multiple expansion chips effectively reduces those limitations significantly, there should be a limit on how many expansion chips are available at one time.
Terrible idea. That basically boils down to restraining the end user for arbitrary reasons. The NSF spec supports all expansions simultaneouly, and that's what FamiTracker should do as well.
heheh, Sunvox isn't that hard to use... It's just that nasty-ass nonsensical effects column that always gets me.
Having multiple expansion/2A03 chips of the same type would indeed be very awesome. In a sense it would be realistic too; say you have two systems to play the music back on and just want the second chip in famitracker for reference while creating the music before you seperate the tracks into two NSFs after the song is completely tracked, It would make things quite easier.
Maybe even a feature to export each 2A03 chip into their own respective NSFs? That would be beyond awesome.
EDIT: Just saw jrlepage's post, and I should probably mention that I agree. It's an, uhm... interesting idea, but it just puts unnecessary limitations in place.
Actually the NSF spec doesn't support it; it just never forbid it, and a bunch of players ended up supporting it.
Technically the FDS has a conflict in the spec with some of the others; FDS has RAM everywhere, which register writes for VRC6, VRC7, and N163 will overwrite. Again, the spec never addressed multi-chip, so there's no standard way to deal with it. (I think currently NSFPlay will let the writes happen, but I'm planning to change this in the next version. FDS multi-chip NSFs may have some subtle memory corruption issues because of this.)
Anyhow, multiple copies of the same chip has been done for some situations (e.g. the OPL3 could operate as two OPL2s in a stero pair, goattracker has a stereo version, dual pokey, etc.), though I don't really expect it'll ever gain traction for NSF.
Yeah I should've mentioned that FDS+other expansions isn't technically supported, but my point is, the NSF spec allows multiple expansions. *pedant pedant*
OK, so forget about limiting the amount of expansion chips. I'm a no limit soulja! I guess I told ja! (Wow did I just show my age...)
I was just thinking that having no limitations whatsoever would be dangerous in the wrong hands...but I suppose that's a risk worth taking in order to have so many possibilities.
Zephemeros: I agree about SunVox...I rather like it, but that FX column is ridiculous. That's always where I get frustrated. But then again, I find that no tracker's FX column is as well thought-out as FT's.
rainwarrior: Dual POKEY music is awesome! That was actually part of what piqued my interest in dual-2A03 music. It sure would be nice to track them simultaneously, even if the results, as zephemeros suggested, may have to be dumped into two separate NSFs.
I guess all this talk of multiple expansion chips, etc has opened Pandora's Box in a way...where do we draw the line? Where is the line with you? (any Bjork fans?)
The only comprimise I can think of for dual chips is to have an NSF column in the tracker. That way you could track NSF B while simultaneosly listening to NSF A.
Then again, that sounds waaaaaay harder to implement than just having a Left set of chips export to NSF A and the Right half of the tracker screen to NSF B.
It was a nice thought anyway!
I would really like to see something like this implemented eventually...
maybe we're thinking too far ahead? I mean, jsr hasn't even officially implemented multi-chips yet, let alone multiple copies of chips.
Personally I'm perfectly happy with one expansion at a time. What I'd like to see are things like linear pitch effects and A-note vibrato fix, which are already implemented in Musetracker.
By incorporating the text data specified multi-expansion sound chip variety to be usable, it can be used multi-expansion sound chip variety, is now usable multi-expansion sound chip that includes Sunsoft 5B that was not available in the previously was.
However, in the current version, it does not support the creation of NSF from FTM data using the multi-expansion sound chip.
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And is now aiming for the completion of all of the DPCM instruments.
It never did. And what's the point of including 5B if almost nobody here can even use it (because you have to make a special S5B instrument) and then you have to use envelope effects because the instrument properties isn't finished yet...
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"im going to continue making this crazy stuff then after a while my style will be so sick that you will be like damn suuun that shit is so sick i dont even get it. i will be like bro its ok.. you dont have to." -omgdonut
I can't help but imagine you endlessly typing every possible number into the EXPANSION field, just to give us access to a chip which is still unimplemented and broken in an unimplemented feature.
unfinished, broken, unfinished multi-chip...
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[BURNING LOVE] YouTube Twitter (Stay off my lawn, kids)
In the current version, for Sunsoft 5B is unfinished, features Sunsoft 5B is because it seems to not be able to take full advantage of yet, please look forward to support from the completion of the Sunsoft 5B in the next version.
In addition, full support for multi-expansion sound chip is undecided in the future.
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And is now aiming for the completion of all of the DPCM instruments.
:D :P 
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