I'm 99.9% certain I know this answer to this but someone asked and now it's put a tiny seed of doubt in my mind: does the PowerPak emulate audio on NES rather than use the APU?
Why would it? If it did, without a sound-mod, you wouldn't been able to hear any sound at all. Remember, the American and European NES doesn't not have the Audio I/O pins on the cartridge. As far as I know, the internal NES APU is the only sound that isn't emulated, unlike the VCR6-7 and MMC5 (Even though I don't think it supports MMC5 hardly at all..).
Wkter wrote:
the internal NES APU is the only sound that isn't emulated, unlike the VCR6-7 and MMC5 (Even though I don't think it supports MMC5 hardly at all..).
Exactly. It doesn't support VRC7 at all though.
Like I said, my instinct was to say 'no' but you know how it is once someone puts a tiny bit of doubt in your mind
In fact it does both.
Normal audio is of course done by the NES, but the PowerPak emulatres FDS, VRC6, Sunsoft-5 audio for games (but it doesn't seem to support them on NSF mode yet). Also it doesn't seem to support MMC5 and VRC7, until I've missed some kind of update.
The PowerPak emulates the mapper controllers and not the APU. For the expansion sound chips, the PowerPak emulates those.
retrousb never mentioned that the powerpak has a pwm chip inside to replicate external audio from games like akumadjou densitu,lagrange point,gimmick etc,,,
it makes me wonder how it can simmulate or replicate analogue audio???,concidering those soundchannels are NOT pcm samples,but they,re register/commando signals instead.
besides why they ditn't had made a nes to famicom convertor wich supports external audio input,till now, you get to mod a convertor and a pal,ntsc nes to enable external sound.
Their site says it's powerful enough, I just think nobody has taken enough time over these specific mappers. The FPGA can do whatever you program it to do with the mapper files, and can emulate multiple chips and expansions, they just don't have the extra sounds created yet. Or shall I say, loopy doesn't have them created yet.
3gengames wrote:
Their site says it's powerful enough, I just think nobody has taken enough time over these specific mappers. The FPGA can do whatever you program it to do with the mapper files, and can emulate multiple chips and expansions, they just don't have the extra sounds created yet. Or shall I say, loopy doesn't have them created yet.
So, in layman's terms, does that mean that, given the right mapper files, Powerpak is theoretically capable of producing the extra sounds heard in those games *without* the use of the expansion port?
The NES Game Pak edge connector has no pin for audio. The PowerPak makes the audio signal in much the same way as a Famicom mapper, but it puts the signal through one of the ten pins on the Game Pak edge connector directly connected to the expansion port. All that the jumper pak in the expansion port does is route the signal where it's supposed to go.
What tepples said. I thought it was standard what pin was used, isn't there a list somewhere of what the pins are used for now with any extras?