Game Emu Player (foo_gep) by kode54, Was “Game Emu Player” subt. “feature request” / Now a catch-all thread Options

[Zulithe]

Author notes:
The latest version of the component is always available from here.

Component source code repository [Change log]
Game Music Emu library source code repository - [Change log]

kode, I like the new Game Emu Player plugin. It uses far less CPU when playing .nsf files than fastalon.

I have a question though, this plugin supports the new .nsfe format but it doesn't support the .rsn extention (which many SPC soundtracks are archived into lately), can this be added? This way a user could playback .rsn files in both winamp and foobar2000 without having to rename or extract the files from the archive. Sites like snesmusic.org distribute all of their soundtracks in .rsn. Its really not much more than a renamed .rar file, I'm sure getting foobar2000 to recognize them would be trivial.

The reason for the extention change is becuase there are some problems getting winamp to play archives without a lot of workarounds, so the author of SNESAmp came up with this simple solution.

Here's the link to SNESAmp if you want to try it out:
http://www.alpha-ii.com/Download/Main.html#SNESAmp

.rsn soundtrack archives can be gotten here:
http://www.snesmusic.org/v2/select.php?view=sets

[kode54]

Cutter: Today is your lucky day, I updated the 0.8.3 component.

Borisz: All part of the problem of not having any one perfect core. Even the Gens core that it was using before had its share of flaws. I will report these to Jarek Burczynski since he maintains the MAME FM core that I am using right now, and is better equipped to deal with hardware vs. emulation issues. I think...

How do the full emulators compare to the hardware? Envelope behavior is also important, as there are a number of examples where slow attacks are incorrect. For instance, Star Light Zone and Scrap Brain Zone.

Having multiple cores in the same player is not really a solution, either, if none of them are faithful in every department. Addressing flaws to arrive at one correct solution is probably a better plan.

All of the issues with Alisia Dragoon would appear to be a result of improper trimming. The emulated chip is not receiving certain writes which may have occurred as early as power-on. I even tried fading the Options sound out and jumping to #02 (stage 1-1) and logging a few seconds of silence first, and the result still had a minor glitch. Logging from power on removed the glitches from the music, but also introduced a deafening glitch where there should be no sound at all as the options menu opened. Even more food for thought. (And possibly the only way to fix this would be to use full power-on logs of everything, then write a proper trimmer that would condense all of the register writes before the start mark into a single tick, removing writes which are overridden, writes which trigger notes, and writes which do not have an audible effect on anything, such as the timer port.)

Comix Zone is definitely not suffering from trimming errors, though.

I will think about adding relative playback rate and/or looping/fadeout controls for GYM/VGM. Extending those options for emulated formats will not really be possible since looping information isn't tagged precisely enough to extend the playback duration by N loops, and it isn't really possible to change their playback durations without turning them into register logs. (Simply emulating more or less cycles per sample could make SPC blow up, since the playback code can rely on feedback from the DSP. Although the number of soundtracks likely to be affected is minimal, considering how few blow up in ZSNES. )