Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (7184)

• Revisiting Nosefart and Discovering GME

  30 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  I found the following screenshot buried deep in an old directory structure of mine :

  
  
  

  I tried to recall how this screenshot came to exist. Had I actually created a functional KDE frontend to Nosefart yet neglected to release it ? I think it’s more likely that I used some designer tool (possibly KDevelop) to prototype a frontend. This would have been sometime in 2000.

  However, this screenshot prompted me to revisit Nosefart.

  Nosefart Background
  Nosefart is a program that can play Nintendo Sound Format (NSF) files. NSF files are files containing components that were surgically separated from Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) ROM dumps. These components contain the music playback engines for various games. An NSF player is a stripped down emulation system that can simulate the NES6502 CPU along with the custom hardware (2 square waves, 1 triangle wave, 1 noise generator, and 1 limited digital channel).

  Nosefart was written by Matt Conte and eventually imported into a Sourceforge project, though it has not seen any development since then. The distribution contains standalone command line players for Linux and DOS, a GTK frontend for the Linux command line version, and plugins for Winamp, XMMS, and CL-Amp.

  The Sourceforge project page notes that Nosefart is also part of XBMC. Let the record show that Nosefart is also incorporated into xine (I did that in 2002, I think).

  Upgrading the API
  When I tried running the command line version of Nosefart under Linux, I hit hard against the legacy audio API : OSS. Remember that ?

  In fairly short order, I was able to upgrade the CL program to use PulseAudio. The program is not especially sophisticated. It’s a single-threaded affair which checks for a keypress, processes an audio frame, and sends the frame out to the OSS file interface. All that was needed was to rewrite open_hardware() and close_hardware() for PA and then replace the write statement in play(). The only quirk that stood out is that including <pulse/pulseaudio.h> is insufficient for programming PA’s simple API. <pulse/simple.h> must be included separately.

  For extra credit, I adapted the program to ALSA. The program uses the most simplistic audio output API possible — just keep filling a buffer and sending it out to the DAC.

  Discovering GME
  I’m not sure what to do with the the program now since, during my research to attempt to bring Nosefart up to date, I became aware of a software library named Game Music Emu, or GME. It’s a pure C++ library that can essentially play any classic video game format you can possible name. Wow. A lot can happen in 10 years when you’re not paying attention.

  It’s such a well-written library that I didn’t need any tutorial or documentation to come up to speed. Just a quick read of the main gme.h header library enabled me in short order to whip up a quick C program that could play NSF and SPC files. Path of least resistance : Client program asks library to open a hardcoded file, synthesize 10 seconds of audio, and dump it into a file ; ask the FLAC command line program to transcode raw data to .flac file ; use ffplay to verify the results.

  I might develop some other uses for this library.

• Tele-Arena Lives On

  25 février 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  Readers know I have a peculiar interest in taking apart video games and that I would rather study a game’s inner workings than actually play it. I take an interest on others’ efforts in this same area. It’s still in my backlog to take a closer look at Clone2727’s body of work. But I wanted to highlight my friend’s work on re-implementing a game called Tele-Arena.

  
  
  

  Back In The Day
  As some of you are likely aware, there was a dark age of online communication that predated the era of widespread internet access. This was known as "The BBS Age". People dialed into these BBSes using modems that operated at abysmal transfer speeds and would communicate with other users, upload and download files, and play an occasional game.

  BBS software evolved and perhaps the ultimate (and final) evolution was Galacticomm’s MajorBBS (MBBS). There were assorted games that plugged into the MBBS, all rendered in glorious color ANSI graphics. One of the most famous of these games was Tele-Arena (TA). TA was a multiplayer fantasy-themed text adventure game. Perhaps you could think of it as World of Warcraft, only rendered as interactive fiction instead of a rich 3D landscape. (Disclaimer : I might not be qualified to make that comparison since I have never experienced WoW firsthand, though I did play TA on and off about 17 years ago).

  TA was often compared to multi-user dungeons — or MUDs — that were played by telneting into internet servers hosting games. Such comparisons were usually unfavorable as people who had experience with both TA and MUDs were sniffy elitists with internet access who thought they were sooooo much better than those filthy, BBS-dialing serfs.

  Sorry, didn’t mean to open old wounds.

  Modern Retelling of A Classic Tale
  Anyway, my friend Ron Kinney is perhaps the world’s biggest fan of TA. So much so that he has re-implemented the engine in Java under the project name Ether. He’s in a similar situation as the ScummVM project in that, while the independent, open source engine is fair game for redistribution, it would be questionable to redistribute the original data files. That’s why he created an AreaBuilder application that generates independent game data files.

  Ironically, you can also telnet into a server on which Ron hosts an instance of Tele-Arena (ironic in the sense that the internet/BBS conflict gets a little blurry).

  I hope that one day Ron will regale us with the strangest tales from the classic TA days. My personal favorite was "Wrath of a Sysop."

• ANSI FATE

  24 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server

  The new FATE server is shaping up well. I think most of the old configurations have been migrated to the new server. I see one new compiler for x86_64– PathScale. It’s not faring particularly well at this point.

  New Tests
  As I write this, I noticed that there are now an even 700 tests, twice as many as the last time I trumpeted such a milestone. (It should be noted that the new FATE system finally breaks down the master regression suite into individual tests.) Thankfully, it’s no longer necessary to wait for me to create or edit tests (anyone with FFmpeg privileges can do this), nor is it necessary to keep up with this blog to know exactly what tests are new. Now, you can simply inspect the file history on tests/fate.mak and tests/fate2.mak (I think these 2 files are going to merge in the near future).

  Vitor, as of r24865 : “Add FATE test for ANSI/ASCII animation and TTY demuxer.” Eh ? What’s this about ? I admit I was completely removed from FFmpeg development for much of June and July so I could have missed a lot. Fortunately, I can check the file history to see which lines were added to make this test happen. And if FATE is exercising the test, you know exactly where the samples will live. Here’s this new decoder in action on the relevant sample :

  
  
  

  The file history fingers Suxen drol/Peter Ross for this handiwork. I might have guessed– the only person who is arguably more enamored with old, weird formats than even I. Now we wait for the day that YouTube has support for this format. I’m sure there are huge archives of these animations out there (and I wager that Trixter and Jason Scott know where).

  
  
  It’s an animation — it just keeps going
  

  Meanwhile, the FATE suite now encompasses a bunch of perceptual audio formats, thanks to the 1-off testing method and a few other techniques. These formats include Bink audio, WMA Pro, WMA voice, Vorbis, ATRAC1, ATRAC3, MS-GSM, AC3, E-AC3, NellyMoser, TrueSpeech, Intel Music Coder, QDM2, RealAudio Cooker, QCELP (just going down the source control log here), and others, no doubt.

  Then there’s this curious tidbit : “Add FATE test for WMV8 DRM”. The test spec is "fate-wmv8-drm: CMD = framecrc -cryptokey 137381538c84c068111902a59c5cf6c340247c39 -i $(SAMPLES)/wmv8/wmv_drm.wmv -an". I would still like to investigate FFmpeg’s cryptographic capabilities, which I suspect are moving in a direction to function as a complete SSL stack one day.

  New Platforms
  As for new platforms, the new FATE system finally allows testing on OS/2 (remember that classic ? It was “the totally cool way to run your computer”). Thanks to Dave Yeo for taking this on.

  Further, a new MIPS-based platform recently appeared on the FATE list. This one reports itself as running on 74kf CPU. Googling for this processor quickly brings up Mans’ post about the Popcorn Hour device. So, congratulations to him for getting the mundane box to serve a higher purpose. Perhaps one day, I’ll be able to do the same for that Belco Alpha-400 netbook.