Terrific Audio Driver

A homebrew audio driver for the Super Nintendo.

Features

• A custom loader to speed-up data loading.
• A bytecode-based song and sound effect data format and interpreter.
• Songs written in Music Macro Language (MML). (mml syntax)
• 8 music channels.
• Sound effects:
  • Sequenced sound effects, written in either bytecode assembly (syntax) or MML.
  • 2 sound effect channels, which will duck (temporally mute) song channels G and/or H.
  • Elaborate sound effect dropout behaviour:
    • The one-channel flag set limit a sound effect to a single channel, preventing common and frequent sound effects from using both sound effect channels.
    • The interruptible flag controls if a sound effect can be interrupted (useful for short sound effects, like collect coin, collision and splash) or uninterruptable (useful for long or vocal sound effects).
• Custom ADSR and GAIN envelopes in songs and sound effects.
• Mono, stereo and surround audio modes.
• Lots of effects:
  • Vibrato and portamento
  • Volume slides, tremolo, pan slides and panbrello
  • Detune
  • Left/right channel invert (if the audio mode is set to Surround)
  • Commands for editing the echo buffer parameters in the middle of a song
• ca65, 64tass and pvsneslib APIs
  • The API is asynchronous to minimise impact on the entity/mainloop code.
  • Audio data can be loaded across multiple frames (Tad_Process calls).
  • Audio data is loaded through a LoadAudioData callback, simplifying integration with existing resource subsystems. Alternativly, the tad-compiler binary can create and export the LoadAudioData callback.
  • Audio data can wrap across bank boundaries.
• A GUI for editing and previewing samples, sound effects and songs.

Engine Limitations and Deliberate Design Decisions

• There are only 2 sound effect channels.
  • When a sound effect is playing, music channels G and/or H will be ducked (temporally muted).
• There is no sample swapping.
  • Samples and sound effect data are combined to form the common audio data and transferred to audio-RAM in a single block.
  • The loader has the ability to override the common audio data. If you want to have a special set of songs that contain unique songs (ie, intro and credits), you will need to create a new project (with a different set of samples) and manually swap the common audio data in S-CPU code.
• All pitches and most pitch offsets are precalculated by the compiler.
  • The VxPITCH values for each note are precalculated by the compiler inside a pitch table.
    • The pitch table holds a maximum 256 pitches (512 bytes) and is stored in the Common Audio Data.
    • Limiting an instruments first-last octave will reduce the number of pitch table entries required by the instrument.
  • Where possible, the portamento pitch-offset per tick value is precalculated by the MML compiler. This requires the MML compiler to know what instrument is playing the portamento.
    • If the instrument of the portamento is unknown, the audio driver will calculate the portamento velocity.
    • The MML syntax provides a way to manually set the pitch-offset per tick value.
    • If the song contains a transpose command the compiler will not calculate the portamento pitch-offset per tick value.
  • MP vibrato is precalculated by the MML compiler, the instrument must be known and audio driver transpose must be disabled.
• There is a fixed 1 tick delay after a key-off event.
  • 1 tick will be subtracted from any instruction that emits a key-off event. For example, a play_note c+4 16 instruction will play the note, sleep for 15 ticks, emit a key-off event, and sleep for 1 final tick.
  • This delay is required to prevent popping.
• MML subroutines and loops share a bytecode stack. The compiler will refuse to compile songs and sound effects that would cause a stack-overflow.
• There are no overflow or underflow checks when playing notes.
  • The MML compiler will check for pitch-out-of-range errors, but only if it knows which instrument is playing the note.
• There are no FIR filter overflow or echo feedback overflow checks in the compiler.
  • If the FIR filter or echo feedback overflows it can clip, pop or explode the song. Headphone users should turn down their volume when playing with the echo filter or feedback.
• The CLI song compiler and audio-driver loader cannot detect audio-RAM overflow.
  • The GUI can check if songs will fit in audio-RAM.
  • tad-compiler check can be used to check if all songs in a project will fit in audio-RAM.
• Additional limitations exist for sound effects:
  • Sound effects are played at a fixed tempo (125 ticks per second).
  • The echo buffer and FIR Filter settings are set by the song. If a sound effect enables echo, it can have an inconsistent sound (depending on the songs echo and FIR settings).
  • The default 65816 sound effect queue can only hold 1 sound effect. This typically means a game can only play a single sound effect per frame. If the game requests two or more sound effects in a single frame, the one with the lowest index (as defined by the Sound Effect Export Order) will be prioritised.

Build Requirements

• Rust
• Cargo
• Git
• GNU Make
• A C++17 compiler, compatible with the cxx crate.
• CMake
• Rust (version > 1.55), CMake (version > 3.11), Git and a C++17 compiler to compile fltk-rs. (See fltk-rs build dependencies for more details.)
  • MSVC: Windows SDK
  • Linux/BSD: X11 and OpenGL development headers
• SDL 2 to compile the rust-sdl2 crate
  • Windows (MSVC): Follow the instructions on the rust-sdl2 README to install and setup SDL2.
  • Linux/BSD: Install the SDL2 development headers

Build Scripts

This project uses two build scripts:

• crates/compiler/build.rs: Compiles the audio driver using wiz and extracts audio-driver addresses from a symbol file.
• crates/shvc-sound-emu/build.rs: Compiles c++ code using the cxx_build crate.
• crates/tad-gui/build.rs: Converts markdown files to HTML files so they can be embedded into the GUI application.

Build Instructions

• Import the wiz git submodule.
• Compile wiz.
  • See Wiz - Building Source for more details.
  • The compiler build script expects a binary called wiz or wiz.exe in the wiz/bin/ directory.
• run cargo build --release

Licensing

The terrific audio driver is copyright (c) 2023, Marcus Rowe.

See docs/licenses.md for full license text.

• The audio driver (S-SMP and .spc code) is licensed under the zlib License.

• The compiler and GUI are licensed under the MIT License.

• The audio emulator used by the GUI is licensed under the ISC License.

• The compiler and GUI make use of multiple third party open source projects.

• The GUI is based in part on the work of the FLTK project (https://www.fltk.org).