Added Sinistar (Cockpit version) #11459
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You may want to double check the diff for mame.lst, as GitHub is saying it has >40,000 changed lines |
Oh wow, I have no idea how that happened. What's the best/easiest way to fix that? |
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That's weird, Github's editor is messing up mame.lst after I edit it. I made another branch to copy the file from the master branch and after adding "sinistarc" at line 27500 it modifies the entire file when I commit. |
| /* Same as above, but for second sound board */ | ||
| void sinistar_state::sound2_map(address_map &map) | ||
| { | ||
| map(0x0000, 0x007f).ram(); // internal RAM | ||
| map(0x0080, 0x00ff).ram(); // MC6810 RAM | ||
| map(0x0400, 0x0403).mirror(0x8000).rw(m_pia[3], FUNC(pia6821_device::read), FUNC(pia6821_device::write)); | ||
| map(0xb000, 0xffff).rom(); | ||
| } |
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If this is identical to the one for blaster, you should be able to lift it to a common base class.
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Gotcha. So should I do something like williams_state instead?
| // sound hardware | ||
| config.device_remove("speaker"); | ||
| config.device_remove("dac"); | ||
| config.device_remove("cvsd"); |
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It’s better to move common stuff to a separate protected function so you can build stuff additively. Also FWIW, you can reset sound routes, you don’t need to replace a device just to change sound routing.
| SPEAKER(config, "lspeaker").front_left(); | ||
| SPEAKER(config, "rspeaker").front_right(); |
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If these are front and rear, they should be marked appropriately. I know MAME currently sucks for routing sound outputs, but it’s going to be more trouble to fix things later if they’re marked incorrectly.
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It's okay if I do front_left() and rear_right()? That way headphone users can still experience the stereo effect.
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| Sinistar's cockpit cabinet features two sound boards, one for the front speakers and another for the rear. The rear | ||
| sound board uses a different ROM, Video Sound ROM 10. This is nearly identicial to Video Sound ROM 9, except for | ||
| a routine that adds a slight delay to some of the sound effects which produces the stereo separation effect. | ||
| It also disables the extra ship and bounce sound effects. As seen in the drawing set for Sinistar, there are no | ||
| speech ROMs connected to the rear board, so only the front speakers play speech. | ||
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| If you disconnect the speech ROMs from the upright sound board, Video Sound ROM 9 will play two replacement sound | ||
| effects for the Sinistar's missing audio. Any line of dialogue will be replaced by a generic alarm noise, | ||
| while the Sinistar roar is replaced by a loud square wave synth noise that attempts to emulate the "sini-scream". | ||
| Video Sound Rom 10 disables this functionality so that it doesn't play any error sounds during speech calls. |
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There’s stray whitespace on lines here. Please use the srcclean tool to normalise spacing in the file.
| void sinistar(machine_config &config); | ||
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| private: | ||
| virtual void vram_select_w(u8 data) override; | ||
| virtual void main_map(address_map &map) override; | ||
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| optional_device<cpu_device> m_soundcpu_b; |
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This is never used outside the machine configuration function. You don’t need a member for it.
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You definitely need to fix mame.lst – the GitHub editor destroys large files. |
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For expediency, I cribbed this and cleaned it up as 1c09558 and credited you for the added variants. While I was looking, I also noticed you’d used the revision 2 main program rather than revision 3. I added commented code to send the front/rear speaker output to left/right. MAME’s audio output modules need a major rethink to push the mixdown up a layer. Thanks for looking at this. |
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Hi Vas, thank you so much for taking the time to rewrite the code and approving it for the next version. Unfortunately, I do have some issues with the current audio implementation. After doing extensive research on this game, it is apparent that the sound designer Mike Metz only used regular stereo audio, but placed the speakers in an unusual way (front = left, rear = right) to basically simulate a surround sound set up in the cockpit. Mike calls it stereo sound in his 1983 interview, multiple contemporary magazine articles and even the Sinistar manual itself say the same. It was never a true surround sound setup, therefore it shouldn't be treated in MAME as such. That's also why I originally wrote "stereo separation" and not "reverberation" in the comments for the code, because that's what the second sound rom does; it introduces a delay to produce a stereo widening effect. There is absolutely no reverberation or any post-processing effect done to the audio. My reverse engineered source code of the sound rom breaks down how this works in further detail: Here's a video that I made a while back where I simulated the stereo sound before writing this code. You can hear just how much more impressive the explosions are with this. In the current code, they're notably distorted. With trying to keep with this front and rear speaker setup, the original intention that the developers had with the audio is lost and sounds even worst. I feel that this is counter to MAME's mission in preserving video games as accurately as possible. |
Hi there, this is my first time contributing code to Mame. I used the driver code for Blaster's stereo sound to implement the rear sound board found in the cockpit version of Sinistar. The difference between Blaster's audio set up is that both sound boards in Sinistar receive the exact same input triggers as they share the same ribbon cable (according to the drawing set for the game).
The rear sound board also doesn't have a speech daughter board attached so only the front speaker plays speech.
As a side note, I was also able to reconstruct the source code to Video Sound Rom 9 and 10. If you are interested, you can look at the repository here:
https://github.com/synamaxmusic/Sinistar-Sound-ROM/tree/main
Thanks in advance!