Hey guys I been working on an 8-bit NES style chiptune module for Roblox. I think its gone pretty well. The playback is pretty accurate and I’ve almost ironed out all the bugs.
It works on a similar architecture to the nintendo APU and supports 2oA3,MM5 and VRC6 chip emulation. and it basically changes the volume and playback speed of 7 sound playback objects in order to produce the sounds,
It will play .nsf, .ftm, .vgm and famistudio text files.
I’ve managed to add over 200 songs. So I hope you will check them out.
P.s If you are making chiptunes using famitracker or famistudio and would like me to feature them then please get in-touch.
Has a few questions about what the two rows of buttons do. They control the volume (top row) and pitch(bottom row) of the seven wave channels. for volume: 1 means 100% volume, 2 means 200% and 0 means 0%. For Pitch a +1 means +1 semitone increase do a D will become a D# etc… and +12 is a whole octave.
This is incredible dude well done! Reminds me of the way we used to import music just before the advent of audio uploads in 2013, where we copy-pasted MIDI text data into a script that someone created and it would play a variety of instruments through various sounds.
Awesome scenery too. I have a suggestion if you’re looking for any; you could add basic settings for reverb on the whole track or specific instrument channels that emulate the way these old console chips handled echo
Thanks dude, i will experiment with the reverb idea, The way these old chips did reverb is by simply playing the note a second time with a lower volume, which it already supports. However I will see what happens if i use roblox’s audio modifiers on the sound objects. I could alaso try replacing the wave samples with alternative ones…
Yeah that was my idea, use AudioEffects like reverb and echo! You could even take it a step beyond and allow for certain soundfonts, as I noticed you used the soundtrack for an N64 title in your video before (Banjo Kazooie) - you can actually find the soundfonts for these games on musical-artifacts.com
maybe they are just that popular lol… but yeah i dont thin i can use, soundfonts are def for a midi type system rather than a chiptune type one.
The chiptune system is based around modulating a single wave whereas midi is about playing chains of samples. The major difference is that the waveform of like a piano note, its attack, release, sustain, etc… in a midi type system is dependant on the mp3 samples being used, whereas in a chiptune the shape of the waveform is direrectly set by the composer…
Basically i can swap the waves but i need boring ones like these…
The VRC7 chip works more like a standard midi if i add support for that, it would then probably be very easy to add support for all midi files.
Still Very cool stuff maybe midi support will be a future goal
