Omnimaga

Calculator Community => Other Calculators => Topic started by: Radical Pi on March 13, 2010, 08:08:22 pm

Title: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: Radical Pi on March 13, 2010, 08:08:22 pm
Several years ago, Omnicalc was released, which to my knowledge was the first time that music in calc games seemed feasible. But the sound that Omnicalc could produce wasn't particularly amazing or high quality (although compared to whatever competition it may or may not have had [I don't know], it must have been great), and as far as I know no one ever really used the sound capabilities of Omnicalc for anything more than a gimmick.

Skip ahead to whatever year RealSound came out. This app proved that the 83+ was capable of high-quality sound, but again, the music revolution that I had been expecting didn't happen.

My question is, why? Does no one think it would be worth it? I think everyone can agree that music adds to a game.
Does everyone think it would be too hard to make? Step back and look at all the TI-Boys and Axe Parsers and then tell me again that you think we can't pull it off. :P

Or am I completely wrong and it actually is the standard nowadays? I haven't been back for long, after all.

Side note: While writing this post I kept searching through ticalc.org for any games that I could find that did have music. I thought I succeeded when I found a DDR clone that required Omnicalc... but then it said it just used it for graphics  :-/
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 13, 2010, 08:20:04 pm
the reason for this is because you must buy a 2.5 mm male to 3.5 mm female adapter to fit the headphones in the calculator link port. Because not everyone want to spend money on this nor search for one (these adapters are hard to find in some areas) just to be able to listen to music on calc, music/sound on calc draw little interest. You can use headphones from an old Xbox 1 too, by removing the plastic thing on the 2.5 mm plug, but then the sound only comes one way since there's only one speaker, and since Xbox is discontinued since 2006, these are hard to find today. Another solution is using an AM radio on a radio station with no signal, but the sound quality is terrible. Had the 83+ link port been 3.5 mm, sound on calc would be much more popular.

Another reason is that it slows down games considerably. If you search this forum well, there's a Guitar Hero demo with sound somewhere. Look how low the sound quality had to be decreased for sound to not take almost the entire calculator CPU usage. Notice how the few games with sound, such as Pyoro, only does beeps instead of long sounds/full music because otherwise the game would run incredibly slow. Notice how the softwares that actually can do music/sound while processing other stuff are for 15 MHz calcs only (like the Game Boy emulator for the 83+SE/84+ calcs).

Also, about RealSound: All TI-84 Plus calcs released after April 2007 cannot run RealSound because of a stupid hardware change by Texas Instruments in their calcs. This same hardware change, which is the replacment of the 128 KB RAM chip with a 48 KB chip combo, is what also causes Usb8x/Msd8x, Omnicalc RestoreMem(/Virtual Calc and TI-Boy SE to not work on any TI-84 Plus calculator released after this change, and even crash, in some case. Blame TI for this one. I don't see how they're gonna save money by using 80 KB less RAM in each calc.

I thought about doing a DDR game with sound before, or even a music maker, but since in BASIC the entire execution would stop during sound playback, it would be impractical.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: jsj795 on March 13, 2010, 09:52:18 pm
Yeah, I thought about using omnicalc's play feature (which is the music) within the game, but I could not find a way to play the sound while the game went on. It would definitely have slowed the game down to a crawl, to the point that it would not be playable.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: ztrumpet on March 13, 2010, 09:59:15 pm
I've tried to use Omnicalc's sound function in games, but the problem I hit was keypresses don't even register while a note is being played. :(
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: Hot_Dog on March 13, 2010, 10:10:04 pm
I know that in languages such as QBasic, the computer would execute the next instruction immediately after starting the last note of a sequence of notes; the note could play for 5 minutes, and yet the program would run instructions during those five minutes.

If the calculator does the same thing, I can't imagine how hard it would be to have the program run through one note at a time and execute instructions in between.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: Quigibo on March 13, 2010, 10:12:23 pm
I think those are all good explanations.  The speed is probably the most major of those issues, but even when its not an issue, how many people have you seen carrying around headphones and plugging them into their calculators to play a game?  Its pretty inconvenient in my opinion since it doesn't really add much to games that are already so limited in color and resolution, it hardly enhances the experience.  I only added it to Pyoro because I thought it would be cool and I always wanted to try it.  Yet I don't even own a pair of those headphones.  I just spliced the link cable so I could bypass a speaker to it.

Axe will for sure have some type of ToneOut() command that will be like the pause command except play a frequency instead of doing nothing.  But that's about all you can do since anything more elaborate really takes a toll on the processing speed.  There is no hardware 'audio driver' so you must use software which makes it really slow.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: jsj795 on March 13, 2010, 10:17:04 pm
I actually have a 2.5mm headphone, but it only has one earplug. I found it lying around in my house, and I think it was supposed to be for an old phone or something. Yeah, anyways, it would be pretty weird to play on calc with the headphone on. Also, since a lot of people play calc games in school, even if they had the 2.5mm headphone, they wouldn't use it.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 13, 2010, 10:42:24 pm
I personally think the headphone themselves wouldn't be a big issue. Most people these days carry their iPod or mp3 player at school, so they would have headphones with them. THe real major issue about headphones is really the size of the I/O port. There's also the fact outside an ASM program, when headphones are plugged in, key response is horribly slow
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: calc84maniac on March 13, 2010, 10:43:23 pm
Volume is very low, as well. It would only work in very quiet areas.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 13, 2010, 10:48:40 pm
If I remember, when not inserting the adapter completly in the link port, volume became twice louder, but if the sound was originally stereo, then it became mono. I wonder if this could damage the calc, though...
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: Radical Pi on March 13, 2010, 10:48:55 pm
Everyone has good points, but for the sake of possibly inspiring someone with an idea, I'll give some counterpoints.

Not everyone has the right equipment: Then make it an optional feature, a little something extra for the people who can use it.

It slows down games: Then don't use it in a processor-heavy game? I can't exactly think of any genres that fit this though... trivia games? Maybe some kinds of puzzle games? There must be something that doesn't need to be calculating all the time.

People play the games at school: No real way to hack around this issue I guess.

Volume: *remembers my frustration with RealSound's volume* yeah... nothing there.

As for Axe eventually having at least a simple sound-related command, I'm glad. I'll try to use it to its fullest extent, even if that means building a concept around its slowdowns.

I guess this is for all practical purposes a fool's quest, but I still wish that weren't the case.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 13, 2010, 10:55:57 pm
Well it's alerady optional to begin with, since if you don't have headphones you can still run the programs fine. You just won't get the full speed advantage of no sound support, unless the game has a no-sound mode, but then that makes the code larger or slower.

As for processor-heavy, in BASIC there isn't much games that would remain playable at all with sound. Even a RPG would run very slow, plus someone mentionned about keys not being registered during sound playback. This would make games hard to control. As for ASM, then I guess you have a good point, though, but if you notice, Pyoro, with just tiny beeps, is alerady running at a somewhat low framerate compared to many ASM games, and it's not the grayscale that slows it down because F-Zero has grayscale too and runs at like 30-40 fps, even if it has grayscale Mode 7 to render every frame. Also the TI-Boy SE sound argument won't work, because TI-Boy SE requires a 15 MHz calculator to run. It's way too much demanding for a regular 83+.

I think if you really want a game with sound that bad, you should maybe give it a try, because for many programmers, adding sound to our games isn't really rewarding in the end, since like 3 people will enjoy this feature, and it's a major hassle to add to games, especially in assembly.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: Radical Pi on March 13, 2010, 11:02:09 pm
I didn't know the TI-Boy was SE only. I guess I should have researched that more before making this topic >_<
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 13, 2010, 11:39:17 pm
One thing tho, in TI-Boy SE, when disabling sound, the speed gain is barely noticeable at all. But again, since the processor is 15 MHz, maybe it allowed Calc84 to multitask more, or maybe use interrupts or something, to allow sound to run without slowing the rest down. Sometimes, 2.5x higher MHz can make a big difference. If I remember, there was a SE-only version of the GH clone and it had much better sound quality than the other one. Given how long sound has been done for calcs so far, though, there is definitively a reason why it was not used that much on z80 calcs yet, even if we had 3D and other advanced features for ages.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: calc84maniac on March 13, 2010, 11:46:54 pm
Not only that it has 15MHz, but also because it has much more flexible interrupt frequencies. Interrupts on the 83+ can't go fast enough to play most note pitches, so sound playing is usually forced into the main loop or just played on its own.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: Galandros on March 14, 2010, 10:30:28 am
Hopefully, I have phones to calculator. I have because it came with my cellphone.

I think if someone arranged a sound lib and easily include in grayscale code, it wouldn't be hard to maintain and is a plus to some games.
Sound would be mostly to SE, though. I think speed wouldn't be a big issue seeing the effect of sound in TI-Boy SE...

Without a lib, it is a somewhat hard task to keep and few people would use it after you employed such work... It should be a nice experience to see sound that you produced with your coding skills.  :D

 Anyway it has to be seen as an optional and secondary feature to calc games.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: meishe91 on March 14, 2010, 04:37:01 pm
Just as a little thing. You don't even need to run sound during the whole game. You could just do it for certain parts. Examples of what I mean are like when you pause the game and are in a menu, or in a shop buying, or for a pokemon game when  you are healing your pokemon. Just a side note :)
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: ztrumpet on March 14, 2010, 05:42:50 pm
That's a good point, but I doubt if people would like to have no music playing while they have headphones in. =\
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 14, 2010, 08:21:07 pm
mhmm ztrumpet I am not sure I understand your post well x.x

Did you mean "I doubt if people would like to have no music playing while they have headphones in"? cuz otherwise it sounds a bit contradictory x.x
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: JoeyBelgier on March 14, 2010, 08:43:35 pm
I think those are all good explanations.  The speed is probably the most major of those issues, but even when its not an issue, how many people have you seen carrying around headphones and plugging them into their calculators to play a game?  Its pretty inconvenient in my opinion since it doesn't really add much to games that are already so limited in color and resolution, it hardly enhances the experience.  I only added it to Pyoro because I thought it would be cool and I always wanted to try it.  Yet I don't even own a pair of those headphones.  I just spliced the link cable so I could bypass a speaker to it.

Axe will for sure have some type of ToneOut() command that will be like the pause command except play a frequency instead of doing nothing.  But that's about all you can do since anything more elaborate really takes a toll on the processing speed.  There is no hardware 'audio driver' so you must use software which makes it really slow.

Holy shit I played a game on my calc with sound w/o knowing it xd (and I do have 2.5mm phones here somewhere)
Have to try it out soon.

+ the Toneout() cmd sounds like a cool feature :D
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: ztrumpet on March 15, 2010, 03:15:15 pm
mhmm ztrumpet I am not sure I understand your post well x.x

Did you mean "I doubt if people would like to have no music playing while they have headphones in"? cuz otherwise it sounds a bit contradictory x.x
Oops, sorry about that.  My post is now fixed.
I really should read everything over before I click post... :)
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: meishe91 on March 15, 2010, 04:46:51 pm
Well if you were at home you could just hook speakers up to the calc, that way you don't have headphones on for no reason and when you do hear music it is a surprise :P
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: ztrumpet on March 15, 2010, 05:15:50 pm
Well if you were at home you could just hook speakers up to the calc, that way you don't have headphones on for no reason and when you do hear music it is a surprise :P
Now that would be cool!  I like that idea!  However, that's a limited audience, but it's still a really neat idea! ;D
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: meishe91 on March 15, 2010, 07:41:23 pm
Well wasn't it established that it was a limited audience anyways? :P
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 15, 2010, 09:07:58 pm
lol yea but anyway x.x, let,s try to be careful with that kind of posts.

Btw I remember Benryves had a SE-only program that did 4 channel sound before, but I don't think he ever released it. He announced it on MaxCoderz back in the days
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: meishe91 on March 15, 2010, 09:19:51 pm
I wasn't trying to be rude, it was more of a joke. Hopefully nobody took offence :) (I'm sorry if you did.)
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 15, 2010, 09:42:10 pm
Nah I didn't I just thought it could actually be taken the wrong way, or at least, slightly, since it seemed a bit like NecroF-_-ckk post last night (which was not meant as bad either, though)

Don,t worry too much, though
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: meishe91 on March 15, 2010, 09:48:06 pm
Oh ya, I know what you mean. And ya, I saw that post so I know where you're coming from. I wasn't trying to act like someone skipped over that, was just said as a joke. Thanks though :)
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: cooliojazz on March 15, 2010, 09:59:54 pm
@DJ Omnimaga You mean Quad Player? http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/368/36889.html (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/368/36889.html)
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 15, 2010, 10:03:37 pm
wait! he finally released it? Took a while x.x He was working on it around 2005 or 2006.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: cooliojazz on March 15, 2010, 10:06:48 pm
lol i love that program. :P   I tried to look at the source to figure out how it makes the sound though, but i exploded, because non-uber-basic-asm + cooliojazz = explosion :P
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 15, 2010, 10:16:01 pm
Yeah it seems typical with ASM sound to be very hard to edit. Even Omnicalc music is hard to edit unless you use an editor. I think there's an actual Omnicalc music editor somewhere, but I forgot the name.

Apparently SNES ROM hacking music editing is the same way too x.x
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: Builderboy on March 15, 2010, 10:18:09 pm
I think a while back i played around with Omnicalc and got a calc 'keyboard' going, but it didn't work very well :P Lagged a lot.  SOund is more of a novelty to me and i don't expect to ever use it or implement it.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 15, 2010, 10:33:39 pm
One thing that might be doable but be ridiculously huge is some primitive version of Dance Ejay 1. You would have to convert wav files to this format:

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/176/17685.html

Basically, the music creator would let you paste small sequences of pre-made melodies, but since two cannot be played at once, every possible combinations of melodies, string leads, drum loops and bass lines would have to be recorded and saved as individual wav files, and to be played, the song would need to look through a list of each music file IDs to be played or something like that, depending of which combination of music riffs were specified in that song bar, then play the appropriate file with Asm(. The issue with this is that a 3-4 second wav file in this format is 22 KB, and if I calculated correctly, if for example you had 16 possible melodies/riffs, it would mean 64 possible combinations, assuming you have 4 riff channels, meaning that so few useable melodies would make the program total size jump to over 1 MB in size.

Just the size would throw people away.
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: cooliojazz on March 15, 2010, 11:03:03 pm
@DJ Actually, the sound files weren't too hard too make, I made a few of those, its just the source which i didn't get :P  Also i like that ^^ idea :)
Title: Re: Why isn't music in calc games the standard yet?
Post by: ztrumpet on March 16, 2010, 04:39:21 pm
On the previous page, I didn't think meishe was being rude, he was just proving a point. :)

DJ, that would be really cool!  Of course, you already pointed out the size issue... =\