WIP: U-Type (working title)

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uze6666
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by uze6666 »

Working on power-ups and more levels at the moment and running into RAM issues, although hopefully Uze's good news sounds like a solution!
Unfortunately, the RAM "upgrade" won't be available for mode 3 with scrolling since all hsync cycles are used to handle the complexities of horizontal scrolling. At least not until I find a faster way of doing it.
On the music front: I've got a couple of tunes brewing in Famitracker. Is there some way to convert these to Uzebox format?
We don't have a converter or export plugin for Famitracker format. Though if someone could make one that would be awesome. In the meantime, the only (cumbersome) solution is to generate a NSF and then convert it to MIDI with nsf2midi and tweaking things in a MIDI editor like Anvil or Sonar.

-Uze
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by cosam »

uze6666 wrote:Unfortunately, the RAM "upgrade" won't be available for mode 3 with scrolling since all hsync cycles are used to handle the complexities of horizontal scrolling. At least not until I find a faster way of doing it.
D'oh, nevermind then! It doesn't look too big of a problem, so I should be able to trim a few bytes here and there.
We don't have a converter or export plugin for Famitracker format. Though if someone could make one that would be awesome. In the meantime, the only (cumbersome) solution is to generate a NSF and then convert it to MIDI with nsf2midi and tweaking things in a MIDI editor like Anvil or Sonar.
A converter would indeed be very handy, but I'll give the nsf2midi approach a try- thanks!
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

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Hmm... nsf2midi (0.05 or 0.14) doesn't seem to work for me. I get tiny .mid files from it which can't be read by any sequencers I've tried. The Java midiconv program does something, but I guess I need some instruments for it to do anything? Do I need to make each one as a patch? And how are they linked to the (converted) midi events? I've read as much as I could find on here and the wiki but I'm afraid it's not gelling :?
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uze6666
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by uze6666 »

nsf2midi rarely fails for me. Can you PM me one problem file, I'll try converting it. Have you seen Lee's excellent tutorials ion the subject?

http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title= ... ep_By_Step
http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title= ... n_Easy_Way

-Uze
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cosam
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by cosam »

uze6666 wrote:nsf2midi rarely fails for me. Can you PM me one problem file, I'll try converting it. Have you seen Lee's excellent tutorials ion the subject?
Wow, not sure how I could have missed that great tutorial - it really explained a lot! Finally got nsf2midi working (it helps if you specify the right length when exporting...) and set up the tracks and instruments in Anvil. Wrote a few instrument patches and midiconv produced something which looks sensible, but uzem crashes shortly after starting the song. I'll zip the lot up if you'd like to take a look.
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Double check in anvil what instruments you are using for each channel. The instrument number (ie. 00-grand piano will trigger the very first patch) is usually the culprit in crashes.
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by uze6666 »

but uzem crashes shortly after starting the song. I'll zip the lot up if you'd like to take a look.
I've looked at what you sent. As Lee mentioned, invalid patch numbers on track #4 seems to be the problem here. The noise channels works a bit differently than the other ones. Since pitch doesn't mean anything with the noise channel, midi notes (0-127) instead means which patch to trigger. In your case I can see the notes being played are all on B4, note 59. So it tries to execute an inexistent patch #59 from some invalid location, crashing the program.

-Uze
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by cosam »

Thanks, guys. I thought it might have been something like that but deleting track 4 didn't work when I tried it before, so I figured it was something else. I went ahead and changed all the notes and I now have something playing! The instruments seem mixed up right now, but I'm getting there.
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by Harty123 »

Hi,
cosam wrote:Thanks, guys. I thought it might have been something like that but deleting track 4 didn't work when I tried it before, so I figured it was something else. I went ahead and changed all the notes and I now have something playing! The instruments seem mixed up right now, but I'm getting there.
Do you have some news about this wonderful project?!

-Harty
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Re: WIP: U-Type (working title)

Post by cosam »

Harty123 wrote:Do you have some news about this wonderful project?!
Unfortunately, not much :( I still need to work out the memory (both RAM and flash) issues, and I've not really had much time to work on it lately. To do the game justice, it will probably need to be a "multi-loader" so I might just wait for that functionality.
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