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Yeah, it's just great. Smile I played Chrono Trigger, but never noticed that. There's just so many possibilities with it. Can morph a waveform between square and triangle, do weird custom waveforms with changing timbre, or just anything. And with it being a 256-byte waveform, the changes could be done subtly too. Konami did some cool effects in the Solid Snake soundtrack for MSX2 with their wavetable chip. I don't know why it hasn't been done on Gameboy, maybe the channel has to stop playing to change the waveform or some other timing issue? I don't know if that's the case, but that would be a little problem.
You'll notice that in the following soundtracks :
3-05 Zeal Palace
3-08 Undersea Palace
3-13 World Revolution (second-to-last Battle)
3-14 Last Battle
Also, there is a lot of sound effects in Choro Trigger that use sampled pulse-width effects, like when a monster chants you something (like the robot in the milenial fair) or when you try to save in a dungeon/house where you cannot.
Alternativly, the variable pulse-width samle is often used as a pitch modulator for other SFX channels, allowing fun effects.
CT really DOES use 100% of the SNES' audio features, unlike 98% of SNES games.
Romancing Saga 3 does also some pulse width effects just like CT (same sound engine), but it is less noticeable and the game is less popular.
I assume that the gameboy's channel 3 must be silented to change its wave, so that restricts a lot its possibilities. Maybe not, who knows ?
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True. It'd be pretty simple (a bit CPU intensive though, with only an 8*8 hardware multiplier) to have a global volume control that would multiply the final sample value by something. Just some value that's calculated so the sum of all channels at max volume can't clip. I suppose the same concept could allow odd numbers of channels to work alright too. Perhaps Screamtracker did something like that.
And what about if you actually WANT to play something quiet ?
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I know, that's irritated me since I found out too. Instead, we got an expansion port apparently tailored for the FDS which went completely unused. All those extra cart pins, wasted. At least adding the lockout chip made sense (though I don't like it, especially the regional differences).
Also, the extra connector on the bottom isn't user accessible without removing a piece of plastic that would do unreversible "damage" to the console's case. (I know, it is not any actual damage, but it may be considered as it).
I doubt Nintendo had the intention to sold devices that would plug in the extra connector and say in the manual to take a knife and cut of this piece of plastic.
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I have some cute ideas for a random sample generator too. Next idea I wanted to implement would be something like the NES's looped noise, but you can set the loop length and the random seed. That would be a lot of fun for some crazy distorted noise instruments. Very little input from the NES needed, but fully reproducable.
Cool ! I like randomish sounds too. Chrono Trigger has up to 4 different white noise samples, but using different ADPCM/BRR tricks to get 4 different random sequences and lenghts. It has caused and still causes many problems for emualtors issues, because the exact way the SPC decode noisy samples has been unknown for years, but now I think Anti-Resonnance had found the final algorithm that sound like the real console. The last version of SNES9x still make the SFX in Chrono Trigger sound wrong.
BTW : I was wrong to say no GBA game has digital echo, Golden Sun seems to have it, but only with relativly short echo times (small delay buffer), so there is no cavernous-sounding music like there could have been. Also, I suspect Golden Sun uses pulse width effects in several music and to produce the noise when someone speaks.