XGM player on Megadrive

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Originally Posted by Barone

Hi, Stef!

I tested your amazing player during the weekend and I might say I was blown away by how detailed the visual animations of the channel bars are.
That's super duper cool!

I'd like to ask/suggest a few things:
- Is it feasible to implement an option to, for an example, mute/disable each channel separately or at least each hardware component (PSG/FM)?
I think it would be cool to have the option to listen to each channel or each sound module separately, as we can do in some emulators. But IDK if it's feasible and if it would worth the trouble.
- Could you add an option to leave the background static, solid black? The spacial animation is awesome but at times I found it a bit distracting.
- On the CRT TVs that I've tested, some information is occluded at the boundaries of the screen. Maybe, if feasible, it would be better to leave some minimal bordering area around the screen in order to improve the visibility. Don't know if others have experienced this too.
- For the shuffle function, I think it would be better if it was executed along with a play command, because it only selects a new music track for you now and them you have to trigger the play command yourself.

Of course, these are minor details and possibly irrelevant depending on what you're aiming but I just felt I should share them with you.

Thanks a lot.

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Thanks Barone for your nice feedback :)

So about your suggestions :
- It's really difficult currently to enable / disable YM/PSG channel as this is part of the XGM driver.
What i would like is to have volume control per channel so we could simply disable a channel just by turning volume OFF for that channel but to be honest doing that of FM is definitely not something that easy and i don't know how much free rooms i have to add a such "big" feature (both in term of CPU and memory on Z80 side).
- Yep i could add a key combination to hide/show it, no problem for that one ;)
- I guess it would require a general border, not only bottom ? Well why not, the thing is that GUI looks already very loaded for me :p
I can eventually remove 2 display lines in the playlist (5 tracks instead of 7) so I gain 8 pixels at top and bottom :) Of course i can do the same on left/right edge (less problematic).
- For shuffle, to be honest that would make my life easier to do that :p You probably noticed the bug of the current playing track index which isn't properly updated when you switch from shuffle / orderer mode. But i don't know if other users will appreciate to have music changing every time you switch mode. In fact shuffle here is more about randomizing the playlist or using original order. This one is easy to change though :)

Again thanks for the feedback and suggestions, the next version of XGM player will see some changes regarding them ;)

Thanks for your quick and kind response, Stef.

About the shuffle, I was stupid enough to not notice it was actually a randomizer.
But, maybe, it would be better to have a proper shuffle function which would work as an "on/off" switch applied to the originally ordered list and just "randomizing" the jumps as most players usually behave.
I understand that it maybe problematic to implement a shuffler method but I was thinking about something like this:
- The display ordering of the music list never changes, regardless of shuffle mode status.
- You have two lists with music tracks indexes: List A: read-only, which will always hold the indexing list which is used by the display method and which is consumed when the shuffle mode is off; List B: which starts off with the same content of List A but can be modified by the randomizer, to be consumed when the shuffle mode is on.
- When the shuffle mode is enabled by the user, you put the current selected/playing track as the first index in list B and randomize the rest of it. From them on, when the user pushes PREVIOUS or NEXT track, or the actual track reaches its end, you'll always be consuming the List B sequentially.

IDK if it's any different of what you have implemented, or any feasible or any good in your opinion but that's what I had in mind.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Barone

Thanks for your quick and kind response, Stef.

About the shuffle, I was stupid enough to not notice it was actually a randomizer.
But, maybe, it would be better to have a proper shuffle function which would work as an "on/off" switch applied to the originally ordered list and just "randomizing" the jumps as most players usually behave.
I understand that it maybe problematic to implement a shuffler method but I was thinking about something like this:
- The display ordering of the music list never changes, regardless of shuffle mode status.
- You have two lists with music tracks indexes: List A: read-only, which will always hold the indexing list which is used by the display method and which is consumed when the shuffle mode is off; List B: which starts off with the same content of List A but can be modified by the randomizer, to be consumed when the shuffle mode is on.
- When the shuffle mode is enabled by the user, you put the current selected/playing track as the first index in list B and randomize the rest of it. From them on, when the user pushes PREVIOUS or NEXT track, or the actual track reaches its end, you'll always be consuming the List B sequentially.

IDK if it's any different of what you have implemented, or any feasible or any good in your opinion but that's what I had in mind.

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About shuffle option, indeed i wanted to avoid "false randomized playing" where the player randomly select the next track but in the end it can play several time the same music and totally forget others (that always pissed me in winamp so in the end i prefer to randomize the list then play it continuously :p).
It's why i used randomized list here, i have to admit the icon looks more as "shuffle playing" but for me the idea is very similar and that icon is easier to understand ;)
In fact i can do something as you proposed but the problem then is that you don't know what is the next/previous music. But i think for you it makes more sense to jump to a total different music when shuffle is on ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Stef

About shuffle option, indeed i wanted to avoid "false randomized playing" where the player randomly select the next track but in the end it can play several time the same music and totally forget others (that always pissed me in winamp so in the end i prefer to randomize the list then play it continuously :p).

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Hehehe.
That buggy shuffle got on my nerves too.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Stef

But i think for you it makes more sense to jump to a total different music when shuffle is on ?

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Yeah, it's the "surprise" of the unknown in the next track. And having the list secretly randomized but maintained, you can go back to the last one in the order the suffle mode played it (unlike cheap Winamp).

To be honest, I was thinking about it not only for myself but also for demo/retro parties.
In the future, we could generate our own XGM collection ROMs... You'll probably have the tracks ordered by game/date, like you have in your demo Tecnosoft collection here. But not necessarily you want to listen to all TFII songs until get to some of the TFIV songs... And you may not even want to know what's next for you and your friends.

No big deal though, your player is mind-blowing regardless any of that.

Pretty much every modern player just does the "card shuffle" thing (i.e. put everything in a list, then shuffle that). They even usually let you go backward because they can just traverse the list back.

I keep a list of "played" indexes, and choose another track if I end up on already played track. A track only plays again once entire list has been played.

LOL @ the winamp shuffle thing. Looks like I'm not the only one that was annoyed by that.

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Originally Posted by TmEE

I keep a list of "played" indexes, and choose another track if I end up on already played track. A track only plays again once entire list has been played.

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Then it gets stuck when you're down to one track but the RNG keeps throwing every track at you except the missing one =P (that's what shuffled lists are supposed to handle, it ensures each value appears only once in a random order while still doing the whole thing in constant time)

Released a new VGM compilation for XGM player :) This time it's a tribute to Jesper Kyd and its awesome tracks (mainly from Batman and Robin).
Because of the length of the different tracks i could not put more than 26 so i had to discard a lot of them unfortunately, the selection was difficult :-/
This new compilation also introduce a new version of the XGM Player (version 2), here are the differences:
- bug fixes (still some remains with fast tempo, sometime music pause without any reason)
- added a way to disable the starfield background (START + A)
- added a way to hidden the playlist (except current playing track) for nice blind jukebox parties :p (START + B)

You can download the ROM from here: Download

I also completed my XGM Rom Builder tool so you can build your own compilation (finally).
Note that i developed the tool in java so you need Java to be installed on your system.
The tool is a bit rough but it does the job hopefully, you can download the tool from here: Download

(copy/pasted in first post so people don't miss it ^^)

Hi!

I didn't try the pre-compiled ROM yet, but the builder tool isn't working for me.
I mean, it runs and it even says it's processing something when I select the tracks but they never show up in the window (no list is shown) and it only generates an empty "out.xgc" file and a 256 KB xgmrom.bin file (which might contain the default data).

It didn't show an error message in the UI so I decided to run it from cmd (I'm using Windows 7) in "debug" mode, then it shows the following message when I try to select a VGM track:
http://i.imgur.com/5jQzvpE.png


Edit:
Trying to run the xgmtool manually I got this:
http://i.imgur.com/vVbj6Ti.png

I'm using .vgz files from the Project2612 website. Am I doing something wrong?

It doesn't support yet compressed vgz (compressed) file, you need to unpack them before (and adding VGM extension). I plan to add vgz support for the next XGM Rom builder :-)

Oh, I see.
I've just extracted it using 7zip and them put the .vgm extension in the name, it worked! Awesome.

I just updated the rom builder tool so now it supports VGZ file and .vgm without extension (as Project2612 provide them that way) =)

Thanks a lot for the update, Stef!

I just wanted to add a few words about how much enjoyment this player has brought to me.
I was never a VGM nut and I'd hardly use the MD to play music instead of just listening to a real hardware capture on Youtube. But the XGM Player is really the next level... Being able to see how each channel is used and manipulated in order to produce each instrument/sound effect is just awesome.

Also, a lot of info about the sound usage in the games can be obtained by just observing how the soundtrack actually works. Some games did reserved a FM channel for SFX, not using it for the music track at all. Some others make great use of the PSG, some games don't use the PSG at all and still sound awesome, etc.
Futhermore, games like Skeleton Krew seem to have a more dynamic approach, modifying the parameters of the instruments already in place instead of just exchange them for other ones like most games do.

Really, really awesome.

PS: Fatal Fury 2's OST rocks!

Haha thanks for your really kind words Barone :)
In fact that is something i wanted to do since a lot time now: having a music player displaying state of the different sound chips :)
I can listen and watch it forever ;)

Edit: I fixed a bug with .vgz file (i though it was zipped vgm but in fact it's gzipped vgm which is a bit different :p)