Sound question

This is an archive of a topic from NESdev BBS, taken in mid-October 2019 before a server upgrade.
View original topic
Sound question
by on (#50874)
Im reading the gameboy sound wiki and it says the following to do with the wave channel:

"The DAC receives the current value from the upper/lower nibble of the sample buffer, shifted right by the volume control. "

it says that if the shift value is 4 then it produces silence, which kind of makes sense becaues a nibble shifted right 4 bits produces 0.

However when looking at what it says on the DAC section it says:

"An input of 0 generates -1.0 and an input of 15 generates +1.0, using arbitrary voltage units. "

So how does a value of 0 produce silence when the dac will return -1 which isnt silent?

Thanks

by on (#50888)
When channel 3 is turned off using the bit in the NR30 register, it outputs 0v.
If shift is set to 0% (>>4) it outputs -1v.
(at least I THINK this is right... blargg?)

LN

by on (#50934)
Thanks for the reply :-)

As you said when the channel is turned off it outputs 0v (silence). So when its shift is set to 4 then then it passes 0 to the dac which is -1v. This isnt silence yet the gameboy snd wiki says that shifting 4 outputs silence.

by on (#50949)
Any value held for a long time is called "direct current", or "DC" for short. You can't hear DC, and speakers can't reproduce it.