blargg wrote:
No, now you know the problem thus you can see that it's unsolvable without a lot of work of either A) logging all note commands sent to the SPC-700 (like in the VGM music format), or B) adding a 65816 emulator to an SPC player.
B) isn't too hard, given that PSF and USF players have to do something similar. Do we need a "Super NSF" format similar to NSF but using Super NES hardware instead?
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A is much preferable, but given that the game's soundtrack can easily be stored in a music format called "mp3", there's little reason to bother implementing it.
MP3 is patented; let's say "Vorbis". Infinite play is no problem, as it supports Ogg tags that could be used to represent the loop starting point. But when you record a Vorbis soundtrack from a game during gameplay, you also record sound effects, or you mute out channels that are "bumped" by higher-priority sound effects. In addition, Vorbis can't be easily tempo-scaled like SPC can, nor does Vorbis efficiently support muting individual channels. In addition, SPC is a heck of a lot smaller than Vorbis. Given the way the SPC700 and its DSP work, I'd recommend a variant of A) that involves finding better ways to convert to tracked formats (e.g. XM or IT) which preserve most of the advantages of SPC and add editability.