Castlevania 2 triangle linear counter

(First off, hello it's been a long while since I posted here, and it's wild to see many of the same people still rolling along! Decided to pick up my NES emulator again after 10 years because I needed something to poke at in my spare time, and this is apparently the type of thing that I like to do for fun)

I spent a bunch of time trying to track down what I thought was a triangle channel linear counter emulation bug in the new APU that I'm writing, but I think it's actually a subtle music bug in Castlevania 2, but I can't actually verify on a real NES so I'm not sure.

What I *think* has happened is that CV2's linear counter, at least for the initial town music, was authored against frame counter mode 0, but the game actually initializes with mode 1. As a result, the length counters for the triangle notes are all just SLIGHTLY too long, and rather than having some rhythm to it, it turns into a bunch of long holds. Seems like it was clearly intended to have individual notes, and maybe they switched to mode 1 as a mistake or a last-minute change and didn't notice that this bassline got broken. Oops!

Basically, with mode 0 (i.e. "not what the cart clearly loads into $4017") you get a triangle channel that sounds like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H58lhgcc-nk
But with its actual mode 1, it instead sounds like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaMP6l2UqLw

(note the held notes in the bass at the beginning).

The latter is definitely the behavior I see in both Mesen and Nintendulator (and my ancient emulator code that was using Blargg's awesome libraries, once I fixed it so that it actually sent writes to $4017 to the APU code instead of just not doing that, whoops). My new APU was doing it right, but I was comparing against my old code's output which was wrong. That's what I get for trusting code I wrote 10 years ago and assumed that the new code was wrong because, again, clearly authored to have pauses.


Anyway, has anyone else noticed this? Does this actually happen on a real NES or is there something weirder at play?

First YT video you linked is obviously NSF playback. No details of the file, etc. are given in the video description. No mention of what NSF player is used or what version. Did you not notice this? :( You should be wary of these.

The NSF that I have for Castlevania 2 exhibits the same behaviour as in this video. Details of that NSF are below. I do not remember where I got it, possibly from Zophar's Domain or some other place:



I also have the version ripped by Kevin Horton as part of his nsfcoll.zip collection, which exhibits the same behaviour as the above:



Second YT video you linked seems to be from original hardware. Poster claims this despite broken English, but chose not to record actual video footage, thus makes it hard to actually determine that this was done on real hardware (a blurry NTSC-filtered-like still screen does not act as evidence).

So, to put an end to the nonsense, here's my own recording taken a few minutes ago. I did not care about the video output (re: deinterlacing etc.). Classic non-modded front-loading NTSC NES, composite/RCA out. If you want an HDMI-based recording from a RetroUSB AVS in comparison, just ask, but that's an FPGA-based system.

Please do not forget the fact that Castlevania 2 was originally a Famicom Disk System title, and its music "ported" to work on pure cartridge-based NES units. It would not surprise me if there was a mistake made in the process (example of similar mistakes).

rainwarrior or someone else more audio-savvy will probably comment on the more technical details of the counter and/or look into what's going on, if applicable.

HTH.

Oh thanks! It’s nice to have a recording of the game actually from an NES, I could not find one to save my life! Good to know that the behavior I’m seeing is, in fact, that of a real system (at least in this case)

The first video was definitely nsf playback, I only linked it as an example of the incorrect behavior I was hearing in my old buggy version (video was not from my emu, just one I found on YouTube), sorry if that wasn’t clear.

Anyway, I just thought it was an interesting bug(?) in CV2 that I’d never seen mentioned anywhere, and thought I’d mention it

(Also, that’s a good note on it being a port - I’d forgotten that - and this totally seems like the kind of subtle thing that could slip through during a port and not get noticed)

this is soo fascinating.Even i encountered the same problem and wasnt having any solution but this calculate derivatives online helped me till some limit in 2 triangle counter problem.

thanks a lot