Need someone who's good with music...

Call me immature, but I like my memes. and for a meme I'm making, I'm going to have We Are Number One play with animations and everything on a real NES. Of course, I'll need someone who can take a midi and find the most important parts and narrow it down to two square waves, one triangle wave, and one noise channel. Here is the midi that I would like it to be based off of. You don't need any programming knowledge, I'll be programming it myself. Don't worry about making it into factors of V-Blanks, I can read sheet music myself and will do all of the conversion myself (You will be credited in the video!)

Edit: Sorry, phpBB doesn't support the .mid extention.

Well, I guess if it won't let me import the midi, I'll just give you the link so you can download it yourself:
https://onlinesequencer.net/317297

There is a Japanese saying... I think it's 'Muzukashii to omoimasu'...which translates to something like 'it would be difficult'. Not just the music part, but all of your plan.

But, they say, a journey of 1000 miles begins with one step. (-Lao tzu)

Take it slowly.

Instead of requiring them to write in sheet music and manually converting it to your own data format, writing your own music engine, etc. it would probably be much simpler to have them use FamiTracker, and use it's engine instead. It's already a great tool for making NES music, and there's a large community of people who know how to use it.

Yeah, I don't really know how I would apply the stuff that is made in FamiTracker to a functional ROM, and I don't think I would need an entire music engine considering it will only be playing one song. It would be a very simple program, simply counting the number of V-Blanks and then decides what note to play according to how many V-Blanks it has counted.

The simple way to play music is to use a pre-made music engine.

The complex way to play music is to spend a week writing your own music engine (yes, that's what counting VBLANKs and playing notes means) and week converting MIDIs to whatever arcane data format you reinvent.

Just use Famitone2, like everyone else. It'll be way easier.


There's another one too

Why would it matter whether you're playing 1 song or 20? You need a music engine to play one either way. (I think of the Famitracker music engine probably only like 10 lines of code are dedicated to being able to play multiple songs?)


Well, this is the basic operation of a music engine, but unless you're looking for an Atari 2600 style soundtrack there's probably a little more to it than you are expecting?

Well, It's nice that both of my parents are band-directors, so I realize that I could probably just ask them.

Famitracker allows you to create 'instruments'. Which can do...
Volume patterns

/```--,,,___

Pitch changes, on each note
Duty cycle changes, on each note
Vibrato, pitch slides, etc.

And, it compresses the data.

At the least, you should have volume changes, since real notes fade out (unless you're playing organ or synth).

TL:DR it's hard. Try learning an existing system.

Perhaps the sentiment is "I don't want to spend ROM or RAM on effects I won't use."

Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to say.

Then perhaps a better choice is to compose in FamiTracker with the limits of Pently in mind, convert it to Pently, and use Pently's config file to disable support for features not used.

That was the goal of FamiTone2, which still uses Famitracker to compose the music, just replaces the engine in the NES ROM with a more limited subset with a smaller footprint.

Of course, it's not you that's using it, you're asking someone else to write the music... which is exactly the problem a lot of people have with using FamiTone2: they want to do stuff that Famitracker can that FamiTone2 can't. It's based on only the set of features that shiru wants. If you want your composer to work with sticks and stones instead you can cut down the requirements pretty darn low, but your music is going to sound poorly for it.

(You haven't asked how much ROM or RAM it takes up, though, so please forgive me if I'm dubious that this is your real reason for rejecting it. It has been practical for many modest ROM/RAM budgets in real projects in the past.)


My suggestion to use Famitracker is that you can cast a wide net when looking for a composer/arranger, and it's relatively easy to integrate into a project. Much wider pool of available talent than you can draw on with "just give me sheet music and I'll type it in by hand", and much less work for you.

You sound determined to do it yourself, though, so if that's the case I wish you fun and luck learning the ropes.

Someone on the FamiTracker forums has adapted We Are Number One for the NES:
http://forums.famitracker.com/viewtopic ... one#p19204

Just download the FTM file and use FamiTone2 to import directly into your NES project:
https://shiru.untergrund.net/code.shtml

Unfortunately you may have to remove many of the effects, since FamiTone doesn't support most effects for exported songs. But it shouldn't take too long to go through and remove the unsupported effects while still making it sound decent.

I also found the vocal tracks without any insturmentals here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwQu4UDVqTg I could probably get DPCM samples of "Hey!" and "We are number one!" to use in the song

Well, I think I've got everything I need, I plan to add this to the 2017 Compo.

...and get permission from its author to use it, of course.

(There's also 73k of DPCM samples in that FTM. You'll need to remove them to get it to work in FamiTone2, unless you want to add support for bankswitching somehow.)

Also note that an entry using a musical composition by a songwriter in the mainstream music or TV industry will not be eligible for inclusion on the multicart.

"We Are Number One" written by Máni Svatersson for LTS Garðbær Studios, now part of Turner Broadcasting.

Oh, I'll try to come up with something more original then. Speaking of which, would we be allowed to partner with somebody? I'd be a good programmer, but I kinda suck when it comes to designing an actual game.

Teams are allowed.

The main reason that I'm choosing to manually type in all of the code is simply because of lack of knowledge. I read on the FamiTracker wiki that it has some sort of importer that allows you to import NSF files and put them into FSM files or something like that. But that's not what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to somehow make the NSF play in my ROM alongside with all of my graphics and animations, which I can't find any information about when doing a Google search. I also don't understand how I would import the DPCM samples on the ROM using Tokumaru's NROM template.

That's a good question.

You can play NSF files inside a game/demo.

This question was asked before on the forum, let me see if I can find it...

Edit...here's one...
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=14380&p=173138

The simplest thing you can do is incbin the NSF itself, which contains the player and the songs, at the "load address" indicated in the NSF's header. Then you can simply put the song number in the accumulator and call the NSF's "init address", also specified in the header. Finally, call the "play address" (also specified in the header) once per frame.

The main drawback is you're stuck with the ROM and RAM layout the NSF needs, and you can only use what the NSF doesn't use. Not a big deal in simple programs, but definitely bad if you're making something bigger and need more control over the memory layout.

So what you're saying is that basically an NSF file is basically a glorified ROM with code but no graphics? If so, I could probably disassemble it and edit the code so it works with my ROM, but that would be impractical, because there's nothing more nightmarish then editing someone else's uncommented assembly code.

Yes NSF is intended to be emulated as an NES with (optionally) no PPU.

If it's made in Famitracker, the source code is available, you don't need to go in blind.

If you can make it in Famitracker it will most likely be usable in an actual NES console, esp. if you're not planning to do any difficult tricks with the music and/or everything else (graphics, input, etc.) that requires CPU time. Prefer Famitracker "source code" than a NSF file, it'll be a lot easier for you.

I don't understand your gif, punch. Did I mistranslate? The concept was supposed to be a polite way of saying 'no'.

It's a Metal Gear Solid reference, don't tell me you've never played it, come on.
The character I'm referring to has 90% of her dialog composed of proverbs and such.