Upcoming: NES Audio Emulation in Reaktor
One of the reasons things are so slow around here this week is that I’ve been spending an awful lot of time trying to get a good sound emulation of the Nintendo up and running. I was inspired to this project by a similar upload to the user library, but that ensemble was built in primary and lacked much of the audio character of the NES. In this project I’m attempting to work in (most of) the limitations that the original NES has, and to painstakingly recreate each oscillator.
Fortunately, several emulators for the Nintendo have already been written so this is a fairly well documented endeavor. This site has a very comprehensive analysis for those who are interested.
I’m still working out some parts of the system, but the pulse and triangle waves are finished enough to show them off. Here is an audio sample, the whole thing made with one instance of the ensemble (yes, it’s polytimbral!).
If the drums sound off to you, that’s because I don’t have a real system to compare them to, and also because the noise oscillator is still a little rough. If anybody has an old copy of Rad Racer kicking around, let me know how it sounds, as I’m comparing to other emulators right now.
The 2A03 emulation in CHIPSOUNDS http://www.plogue.com/products/chipsounds/ would probably be a good reference.
I actually found some waveforms taken from the NES as a reference for everything but the noise channel. The waves my oscillators produce sound identical to my very poor ears, played on crappy laptop speakers.
Sounds really great! I love this blog!
Have you checked out the 8bit aliasing effect from Xfer here?
http://xferrecords.com/freeware/
no i haven’t, but i am familiar with mr. duda from the monome forums.