agbplay is a music player with Terminal interface for GBA ROMs that use the most common (mp2k/m4a) sound engine format. The code itself is written in C++.
- Arrow Keys or HJKL: Navigate through the program
- Tab: Change between playlist and songlist
- A: Add the selected song to the playlist
- D: Delete the selected song from the playlist
- T: Toggle whether the song should be output to a file (see R and E)
- G: Drag the song through the playlist for ordering
- I: Force song restart
- O: Song play/pause
- P: Force song stop
- +=: Double the playback speed
- -: Halve the playback speed
- Enter: Toggle track muting
- M: Mute selected track
- S: Solo selected track
- U: Unmute all tracks
- N: Rename the selected song in the playlisy
- E: Export selected songs to individual track files (to "$cwd/wav")
- R: Export selected songs to files (non-split)
- B: Benchmark, run the export program but don't write to file
- Q or Ctrl-D: Exit rrogram
- ROMs can be loaded and scanned for the songtable automatically
- PCM playback works pretty much perfectly; GB instruments sound great, but envelope curves are not 100% accurate
- Basic rendering to file done, including dummy writing for benchmarking
- Add missing key explanation for controls
- Change to an audio library that doesn't print ANYTHING messages on stdout
- Redo config system (perhaps in XML) to support games to share playlist (for games only differing in terms of language) and to allow multiple playlists for one game
libboost-all-dev/boostportaudio19-dev/portaudiolibncursesw5-dev/ncurses5-compat-libsAURlibsndfile1-dev/libsndfile
The INI file is intended to be self explanatory. Each game has a section which starts with the game's code from the ROM header:
[GAME]
The song names are stored with a 4 decimal digit key (which corresponds to the song's ID) assigned to a value with the song's name:
[GAME]
0001 = Main Theme
0002 = Boss Battle A
0015 = Credits Music
Usually, you don't have to put in the song names in there manually since you can add them through the Terminal interface.
In addition to that, you can set the game's engine runtime parameters (reverb, samplerate, master volume). The following example set's the game's master volume to 14, default reverb to 0 (i.e. off) and a sample rate setting of 6:
[GAME]
ENG_VOL = 14
ENG_REV = 0
ENG_FREQ = 6
0001 = Main Theme
0002 = Boss Battle A
0015 = Credits Music
But what do those magic values mean?
On Nintendo's engine (that runs on the hardware) it allows the developer to set a master volume for PCM sound from 0 to 15. This doesn't affect CGB sounds and changing it will result in a different volume ratio between PCM and CGB sounds.
As for the reverb level, you can globally set it from 0 to 127. This overrides the song's reverb settings in their song header.
The 'magic' samplerate values are listed below. Note that the 'magic' values
orrespond to the values like they are used by m4aSoundMode. agbplay will use
his 'magic' value to get the sample rate for so-called "fixed frequency
sounds".
Magic values (in Hz): 5734, 7884, 10512, 13379, 15768, 18157,
21024, 26758, 31536, 36314, 40137, 42048
One more thing about reverb: Most games just use Nintendo's default reverb algorithm (or reverb of 0 for no reverb at all). However, some games have implemented their own algorithms. You can use the following values in combination with the option ENG_REV_TYPE to set it:
NORMAL= Nintendo's normal reverb algorithmGS1= Camelot's reverb used in Golden Sun 1GS2= Camelot's reverb used in Golden Sun TLA (aka Golden Sun 2)MGAT= Camelot's reverb used in Mario Golf - Advance TourTEST= Only use this if you use the TestReverb class for developing your own algrithmNONE= disabled (not used in normal games)
Last but not least, agbplay now supports different resampling algorithms which
can be set in the INI-File. There is a setting for normal PCM sounds
PCM_RES_TYPE and PCM_FIX_RES_TYPE for fixed frequency sounds (mostly used
for drums). They sypport the following values:
NEAREST= Fast! Commonly referred to as "no interpolation". Sounds pretty bad in most cases but can give you that low quality crunchyness. You most likely want to use BLEP over this one (NEAREST is wayyyyyyy cheaper to compute, though).LINEAR= Fast! Interpolate samples in a triangular fasion. This is what's used on Nintendo's hardware (although with different target samplerates). Recommended for normal sounds.SINC= Slow! Use a sinc based filter to avoid aliasing. For most games this will filter out a lot of the high end freuqnecies. The only case I'd recommend this is for games that generally use high samplerate waveforms (I like to use it on Golden Sun TLA which uses 31 kHz for drums).BLEP= Slow! This generates bandlimited rectangular pulses for the samples. It's similar to NEAREST but NEAREST will not bandlimit the rectangular pulses so it's going to cause frequency band folding. Use BLEP if you want to fake some brightness into your drums (i.e. fixed frequency sounds) since this is the way hardware does it (except BLEP will clean up the higher frequencies which NEAREST doesn't).
This is what a complete config INI might look like:
[GAME]
ENG_VOL = 14
ENG_REV = 0
ENG_REV_TYPE = NORMAL
ENG_FREQ = 6
PCM_RES_TYPE = LINEAR
PCM_FIX_RES_TYPE = BLEP
TRACK_LIMIT = 12
0001 = Main Theme
0002 = Boss Battle A
0015 = Credits Music
TRACK_LIMIT will simply limit the amount of tracks a song can use. This is useful to accurately playback games which try to use more tracks than are available on the specific hardware configuration.
If you have issues installing portaudio19-dev on Debian (conflicting packages) make sure to install "libjack-jackd2-dev" before. The reason for this is that portaudio on Debian depends on either the old dev package for jack or the jack2 dev package. By default apt wants to install the old one which for some reason causes problems on a lot of systems.
Install all dependencies (listed above) and run make.
The code itself is written to be cross-platform. That's why I've decided to go with Boost and portaudio.
It has been tested on Cygwin (Windows), Debian and Arch Linux, all on x86-64. Native Windows support with Visual Studio is NOT supported by me and I NEVER will. Getting terminal things to work on Windows with UTF-8, colors and resizing terminal just doesn't work.
If you have any suggestions feel free to open up a pull request or just an issue with some basic information. For issues I'm mostly focused on fixing bugs and not really on any new features.
Please be reminded that this was a "C++ learning project" for me and therefore the code is quite weird and probably contains a lot of "bad practices" in a few places.