Besides, I think beeps are more interesting than waves on the speaker
(*) these days - there’s too much crappy, monotonous, or polished but
just plain boring wave sound effects played on real PCM hardware
anyway. It’s time someone did something different instead of trying to
do the same thing in different ways!
(*) goes for analog/hybrid chips as well, although 12 bit wave audio
using pulse waveform PWM on the SID is pretty cool - and sounds very
good.
Something SID Engine like for whatever speaker, DAC, Soundcard would be
very cool.
Although it would be possible to just rip a SID emulator, I’m more into
extending the design ideas into a virtual “SuperSID”. It would play on any
wave output device - speaker and Covox DAC included, provided you’re on a
platform with a driver for that. (It would not, however, play on a real SID,
such as a HardSID card, as it would rely on more channels, more waveforms,
more powerful filters etc.)
Is there a portable SID Player out there that could be used with
SDL directly or indirectly ???
Well, at least one of these is GPLed, and one already plays C64 tunes on
countless machines running various operating systems:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5147/resid/
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5147/sidplay/index.html
However, these are designed to play “SID files” (ie C64 music with included
player in 6510 machine code) as accurately as possible, and they are very
CPU intensive in relation to the sound they produce. This goes for reSID in
particular, which is cycle accurate, and won’t run on anything slower than
233-300 MHz, according to the web site.
The whole idea of emulating half a C64 is just crazy for generating sound
effects for new games - apart from the huge CPU load, you’d have to code
the sound FX engine in 6510 asm, for the SID chip. You’d also have to hack
the emulator to get a direct, low latency connection for sending commands to
your FX engine.
Then again, your sound effects would play on a real C64 with little or no
tweaking.
Anyway, my idea was to design something that sounds similar, but uses a
simple, clean and efficient design, similar to what you’d find in a modern
soft synth. Basically a callback driven engine that takes commands from a
lock-free FIFO.
//David
.- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
| Multimedia Application Integration Architecture |
| A Free/Open Source Plugin API for Professional Multimedia |
----------------------> http://www.linuxaudiodev.com/maia -' .- David Olofson -------------------------------------------. | Audio Hacker - Open Source Advocate - Singer - Songwriter |
--------------------------------------> david at linuxdj.com -'On Wednesday 07 March 2001 22:38, WIZARD / SYNTHETIC - Crew wrote: