Could a flash applet play emulated music formats? by Dais! at 9:09 PM EDT on July 2, 2009
Recently I was musing over yet another aimless thought, concerning non-hateful ways to embed music into web pages. MIDI embeds of the Geocities sites of yore are of course straight out, conventional sound files embedded as SWF can be quite annoying and Youtube is no real solution at all.
Then I recalled that over at the Sonic Retro Wiki, quite a few pages had a simple mp3 player for playing music tracks on pages concerning soundtracks and rips. Unlike a lot of flash applets (cough youtube cough), having a large number of these embedded on a single page didn't make Seamonkey (don't ask) want to kill itself (or succeed in doing so). They also seemed to function quite nicely.
The applet is Dewplayer, a free little flash mp3 player you can just grab and put on your site, assuming you're actually thinking intelligently about the bandwidth such a move will cost you. This seemed pretty ideal for my theoretical, vaguely-defined purposes.
But it occurred to me then....could you make a flash applet that would mimic the effect of a music player such as Audio Overload or other non-plugin utility dedicated to playing emulated music formats? I mean, I have to admit I don't really understand what goes on between the hardware and software when I tell my system to play such things, but I assume it must be possible in some way or another.
So I guess my question is more....could such a flash applet be reasonably made by someone dedicated enough to make it? Something that could read an SPC or perhaps even an NSF or PSF-variant from a server and play it as if were an mp3 through Dewplayer?
The "reasonably" is the key part. I'm not asking if it's within the realm of possibility (I'm sure it is), or if it could be knocked together in a few days, but if it could be made by a reasonably competent flash programmer without driving them mad first.
In theory it could be done. There is a script floating around that can get flash to load WinAmp plugins, and then play the supported files so if anyone can be bothered, yes. But it would be un-necessary work, and I doubt anyone would willingly do that, so it is highly unlikely.
AS3 VGM Player v1.1 (24K) VGM files player with SN76489 sound chip emulation for Flash Player 10. Allows to play music from Sega Master System and some other 8-bit systems in the Flash applications.
Flash? Maybe you will get more luck with Java applets instead. I am not sure ActionScript is powerfull enought for an easy translation of C code of existing plugin/players.
Format doesn't matter as long as function and favorability* are there. The idea is to have something that requires no extra downloading from someone who has updated to a fairly mainstream browser in the last three or four years. I merely made this topic talking about Flash because it's the "hip thing" all the "kids" are into, and also because that's what dewplayer uses, and also because {embed src=""} has a certain poetry to it.
That thing anewuser linked is theoretically quite neat, unfortunately I'm far too daft to understand how to actually use it. Also this browser may not be Flash 10 compliant.
Just thought it would be neat to bump this topic (just a few days past a year later) to get some reactions to the new progress made in Flash implementations of the Game Music Emu work:
(I first learned about it when I saw the changelog for Super Mario Crossover yesterday)
Obviously these aren't perfect, but they're an interesting step forward. If anyone has seen any other apps along these lines, feel free to post them here.
I'm stoked that the flash nsf player has NSFE support! I have tentative plans to organize a new NSFE archive that has only completely tagged soundtracks, with each soundtrack embedded for easy listening of course.
I'd love the idea of being able to visit a website and having basically every NES soundtrack you'd want to listen to right there. Most of us have NSF players and the archive here downloaded on our computers, but there'd be something likable about having a place where you can just 'press play' to listen without downloading anything (if you're on another computer, or any other number of reasons).
Also, through my youtube channel I've had to explain and share the existence of NSFs probably countless times now. While it's fruitful most of the time, I think some people are too lazy and uninterested to pursue them further when it involves downloading more than 1 thing. If someone simply has the base goal of "I wanna hear Guardian Legend!", a flash NSFE archive would be awesome for that.
I have a couple projects I'm sort of busy with ATM, but I'm absolutely set on making this happen later this year. :)
That sounds like a great idea. I look forward to it.
I wish I could understand the overall/SPC players that Japanese dude did...I'm not very flash savvy, and can't make heads or tails of how to make the files I downloaded from the site play on my own machine, let alone hosted from some other space..
I haven't asked the slickproductions guys yet about permission for using NSFEs submitted to their archive. I can understand why they might not be into that, so I imagine it might require contacting some of the submitters individually and asking them. I hope that doesn't come across as sneaky- I'll still ask lenophis first what he thinks about it.
But I take it that it's ok to use your NSFEs, lunar? :) (speaking of which, the new ghostbusters II nsfe was a huge help for this - http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B40EF64CCA0D6C43 )
Megamatt and I still have a lot more not yet submitted to slickproductions (over 50!)- LINK