Emulating game systems in pxtone

Feb 21, 2014 at 8:44 PM
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Join Date: Aug 9, 2011
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Age: 25
For the past year or two I've been writing most of my pxtone tunes with generic instrument samples created using the Genesis soundchip in Deflemask and then recorded and clipped into .wav files. So far it's worked well enough (you can read about my first album over here), but of course because they're recorded samples they lack some of the qualities that would be present in actual emulation:
  • Smooth-sounding infinite length after attack
  • No inconsistencies in at different pitches
  • Sound after note release
I'm aware that the .ptvoice format works very well with pxtone and supports all of those, but I'm having trouble getting the sounds I want out of it, either by making the instruments myself or through sample packs others have made. From what I can tell it's much simple and less capable than the chip found in the Genesis, which is the sound I'm trying to emulate. I can work with Deflemask if I have to (I've got enough experience with trackers; I've worked quite extensively in Famitracker), but pxtone is very much more usable in general, whereas Deflemask is, in my opinion at least, quite confusing and buggy in its current state.

What I'm looking for is someone who knows more about the format of Genesis instruments (.tfi from what I can tell) and .ptvoice, and the expandability of pxtone. The way I see it there's a few solutions to my dilemma, but only one of them I can handle on my own:
  • Record the sample for a very long time at every pitch I could possibly require and use the voice function of the volume panel to change the voice every time there is a change in pitch (Obviously this would be quite difficult to work with, but I'm assuming it would be possible to write some kind of converter that could re-write pitch changes as voice changes automatically.)
  • Re-create the samples as faithfully as possible as a .ptvoice (Is there a way to automate this? Some sort of converter that could evaluate the .tfi instruments and write their volume patterns/tone color to a .ptvoice?)
  • Find a way to emulate the playback of .tfi instruments (and possibly other soundchips) within pxtone, through some sort of plugin (Not sure how possible this is, but if it was easy enough to emulate any soundchip pxtone would be a brilliant platform for chiptuners)
I'm willing to do some work to make this possible if anyone has any ideas. I only have a bit of programming experience but I'd be willing to learn how this stuff works if anyone is interested and can help me along a bit.
 
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