Memblers

512 is a bit much, but lots of fun stuff can be done with 64+ instruments. Morphing between waveforms. Adding different levels of resonance or filter changes to the same sound. As an extreme case, the C64 SID chip has 12-bits of pulse-width control.. replicating that on a sample-based system would take up 4096 "instruments" (though it's overkill for sure.. and since SNES samples are in RAM, in this case at least it could probably be rendered in software instead of storing pre-rendered ones).

Try doing a google search for Galaga "RAM OK", you'll find a lot of detailed troubleshooting info. It may be something as simple as a corroded IC socket, or failed electrolytic capacitor. Simplest thing to try, other than visual inspection, would be pushing the chips down in their sockets, starting with the CPU and EPROMs. You may be able to ship the board to someone who will repair or swap it for you. I think it would be a terrible waste to convert an original Galaga cabinet into a multi-game thing. I imagine to a collector it's worth considerably more unmodified, even being non-working, compared to being modified into a multi-bootleg thing. There are tons of less desirable games that could be converted instead. Just my opinion.

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ActRaiser soundtrack is amazing, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't stream anything, that was rarely done in any games. There's one easy way to know: if there's a working SPC rip of the music, then it doesn't stream anything. Because SPC format doesn't allow for it.

I imagine you're thinking of something along the lines of NESMaker, and to get a realistic view, I'd urge you to take a closer look into it. I don't mean this as a slight against people using that tool, but seems like 90% of the stuff made with it is very much "cookie-cutter" in terms of gameplay. Creativity is still possible, but only within the hard boundaries of a pre-made engine. From what I've seen, the stand-out games made with it tend to rely on "plugins" which as it turns out, is just plain old 6502 assembly written specifically for the game. My impression is that when using NESMaker to make a truly unique game, one would end up using NESMaker mostly as an asset manager (potentially useful, even still). Nothing wrong with that, it's a way into the hobby. Some users who started with NESMaker even moved on to writing games from scratch, to be rid of any imposed limitations, and as you say, make whatever kind of game they want. I'd bet the tools we have available now, for free, are better than what SNES developers had access to back in the day. Surely the documentation and general availability of information is a lot better. I'm sure using a PC-98 with those Emulator-SE boxes was quite cool, but compared to what one can do with Mesen? Probably not as useful. Anyways, it's crazy to me how much name-calling, trolling, etc. is going on around here. Yeah, I'm also somewhat baffled that Kirk doesn't want to learn how to program, while also having this intense interest in the PPU. To me, the PPU is harder to work with than the CPU. At the same time, I don't think "SNES development" should be gate-kept to programmers only. Artists, composers, designers, even testers.. all essential to development. "Idea guys", well, maybe not as much, unless they're also hiring and paying people, haha. For that matter, a lot of game code is crap that barely works, anyways. That's fine, it just needs to work. As long as your loop finishes before vblank, on a console it's not like you gain anything by having more idle cycles left over, nobody will ever notice.

I've heard that the first version of the SNES Game Genie doesn't work with some games. You can either try finding a revised Game Genie, or you can try modding it. Reportedly involves replacing some 470 ohm resistors with 100 ohm on the GG board. This seemed to be the solution reached in this NESdev thread https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=190993#p190993 I've attached a photo of the mod by Fisher.

The start game jingle in Defender 2 is also Great Tiger's theme in Punch Out

Interview from someone who worked on Disney's side of things: https://www.nintendoplayer.com/interview/former-disney-game-producer-darlene-lacey/

To be clear, the interval time value is write-only, and the count value is read-only. The count value is how many times the selected interval has passed. The count output is only 4-bits wide, and having it reset when read is good because it simplifies extending it, just add it to a variable to let it accumulate into a larger range. Since there is no interrupt, the SPC program's main loop could have it's idle time polling all this stuff. The main loop needs to complete before the 4-bit count can overflow, otherwise those signals are lost. It may help to manually insert more calls to the polling/accumulating subroutine elsewhere, if the SPC code's worst-case timing runs longer than the intervals. Somewhat related, just this week, the LLVM-MOS compiler started supporting SPC700 in the latest release. Now you can program in C/C++, if you want. Performance-wise it's been great for 6502, and it looks like 65816 support may be coming eventually. https://github.com/llvm-mos/llvm-mos/pull/357 https://github.com/llvm-mos/llvm-mos-sdk

Sounds like you have it narrowed down the connector port. It may have dust inside, or oxidation on the contacts. If you're lucky you can clean it out, I've seen some recommendations for interdental brush and rubbing alcohol. Or maybe another small nylon brush. There are other tips about cleaning headphone jacks online. Otherwise, the port might need to be replaced.

The de-facto standard NES audio expansion mod is intended for NES carts, actually it originated with the NES PowerPak when loopy added VRC6 support to it. You're using a Famicom cart. You'd have to be using a Famicom-to-NES adapter of some kind, and that's likely where the audio is being lost. Most of the FC-to-NES adapters around predate any standardized audio mod, and I doubt most new ones do anything about it, either. So, you may need to modify the adapter. Google searching 'nes to famicom converter audio mod' will turn up some info about it.

I have a copy of it, it's been years since I played it, but yeah it is great. I had a lot of fun playing it. There is a demo version, but the final version improved things, so the demo barely does justice to the full version. http://infiniteneslives.com is open, if they're taking payments you will definitely receive your order.

Any luck? Maybe the power switch has a problem. The unregulated power should pass through it. 13V would be normal from a 9V transformer, when there is no load. It also passes through a bridge rectifier, but that's before the capacitor, so maybe that part is OK.

That's awesome that these files were able to be found. I've found that Henry worked at Datapoint. There's a transcription of a panel where they talked about some stuff here: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102658342-05-01-acc.pdf and the server at home is mentioned.

There's on a few days left on this, sorry this post was a bit late. Check it out if you like. (spammy disclosure: I'm supplying the boards for this release, so I stand to make a couple bucks (literally) from the cart sales.) It's pretty neat, nice looking, the music is fun. It's made by Optomon, who's well known for some cool Castlevania hacks, but this is completely a homebrew. Clearly a very talented developer to have pulled all this off on their own, the only other credit is to the artist for the cover art and manual illustrations. The NSF is on the Kickstarter if you want to hear the music.