Dwedit's Board

biolizardshadow

Guest

How does pocketnes handle sound?

Is sound output through directsound A or B or is it some clever way of utilizing the GB sound channels. I am asking this because the noise channel sounds like a broken version of the GB noise channel.

Dwedit

Administrator

From: Chicago

Registered: 2004-12-12

Posts: 1,022

Website

Re: How does pocketnes handle sound?

PocketNES does sound through the PSG channels.  Square waves, triangle waves, and noise are handled through the GB-like sound channels.

Square wave channel uses a neat trick to get around a GB hardware restriction.  On the game boy/gba, you can't change the volume of the square wave channel, unless you also reset the wave.  So PocketNES also runs timers at the exact same frequency as the square channel, so it can time the channel reset to become inaudible.

Indeed, noise isn't very good.  I wonder if that would need to be software synthesized instead of using GB noise.

---

"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."