This is a demo that plays midi music files on the VB. The nice thing is that we don’t need to convert songs to some special “VB format” to play music using this. Simply embed standard midi files into the rom and use a few simple functions to play them, like LoadSong() and PlaySong() that you must call continuously at a set interval.

I plan to release source code and documentation some weeks after the compo, after I clean it up 🙂 I will also add more features like stereo, different volume and different instruments.

Obviously this isn’t much fun in the emulator 😛 but it works nicely on the flashboy.

Attachments:

1. midiplayer.zip

It would be great to have that kind of functionality in my engine… If you don’t mind to share your code 😛

jorgeche

Nice work, Dan.

very good indeed, music player for the vb, not even the gameboy had that 😛

vb is more then just playing games since now we have a music player and who knows what more features the vb will have in time 😛

Thanks guys, I was going to make a “real” entry (zelda demo), but I was without my dev pc the last 5 weeks, so I whipped this together at the last minute. It would have been a shame not to participate at all in the contest, but I must say the other entries are looking really good and several of them are worthy winners 🙂

Also, the Advanced Map Editor could be considered a semi-entry 😛

at first glance, this one is less interesting than the other entries, but if you think about it, it will be a great step forward for the homebrew scene once the source is released. i’d be happy to include the midi player in blox 2. great work, dan! 🙂

Sounds exciting but doesn’t work for me. Is it just a emu problem? I’m using Reality Boy (don’t have a Flash Boy yet).

reality boy does not support sound! you could try red dragon, but it does not have perfect sound emulation too.

^That would explain it lol. OK, trying Red Dragon…

This music engine will be great to future game releases and for most the current on-progress projects

This is pretty cool… I assume the MIDI is limited to a maximum of 5 channels? To do music in my games I converted MIDIs and MODs before putting them into my program, but of course I’m doing one VB channel per MIDI/MOD channel, which limits us to 5 standard channels.

How do you plan on doing the instruments? Are you just gonna approximate the waveform, or do you plan on adding support for enveloping to get a fade, and some other effects to get some instruments that are more than just a tone?

BTW, is your Zelda game in progress, and you just didn’t have a release worthy game, or is it still in the early stages? I’m really looking forward to seeing a VB Zelda game one of these days.

DogP

Sorry for being such a n00b, but how do I embed the midi file into the rom?

You can’t. This is just a demo to listen to the included songs. There is no way to add your own songs to the player yet, you would have to recompile the rom from source code. (or do some serious rom hacking 😛 )

Heh ohhhh ok. I just wanted to test some MIDI files out on the hardware. Do you happen to know if Reason’s MIDI files will play on the VB? If not, could you reccomend a decent (or possibly free) sequencer thats compatible? Thanks in advance! :thumpup: