Playing Chiptunes in a Web Browser by MultimediaMike at 2:29 AM EDT on July 17, 2012
Hi, first time poster to this forum. A colleague recommended that I drop a note about my new project which pertains to video game music.
The pitch is simple: Play chiptunes directly in a web browser. The website is here: Game Music Appreciation. So far, it catalogs NES, SNES, Game Boy, Nintendo DS, Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast chiptunes.
My colleague suggested that I should eventually incorporate vgmstream at some point. Meanwhile, I hope the site finds some fans from this forum.
I see some familiar names as I look at the main forum index-- Knurek, in particular, a prolific ripper/dumper. Go to my game music site and search for his name. The site indexes the metadata attached to the chiptunes, including ripper/dumper info, though it doesn't presently show that in the interface.
You might want to try using Portable Music Archive for Game Boy/Game Gear games, since the sets there are timed - all your Game Boy songs have 2:30 for the duration, which is obviously wrong.
You can try browsing other xxx.joshw.info sites, they should have more rips than Modland, I've stopped uploading there quite a while ago (xxx can be ssf, dsf, 2sf, nsf, hes, and maybe something else as well, can't recall ATM).
Neat site though, hopefully the server bill won't break your back. :)
Thanks, Knurek. Tracking down good archives of these tunes is one of the challenges for this project. Of course, if I do things right, it obviates the need for normal users to hunt down the songs. :)
Thanks for your work on the GBS metadata. I see that your items rely on separate .m3u files for metadata. I'm currently working on a tool to help me import that into the database. I also need it for KSS and HES files (which the player already supports thanks to libgme).
Thanks for the pointer to the various joshw.info sites. I harvested most of the Genesis tunes from smd.joshw.info. I didn't know he had all those other subdomains.
There's still a lot of work to do. But bandwidth and hosting costs are the least of my worries. :) My hosting plan gives me tons of bandwidth that I don't use each month.
@TheUltimateKoopa: True. None of the GBS files imported into my current database have M3U info associated with them. I didn't even realize that was a tagging option. I have a lot of work ahead of me to get the better GBS/M3U metadata sets into the database.
BTW, if anyone is interested, I posted the source code to the music player: SaltyGME source at Github
How do you know which vio2sf version I am using? I can't tell from the source code but the only version I am able to find from a Google search is v0.23. I would certainly like to get the latest version because I know of a few different Nintendo DS files that sound wrong.
This is a cool project, and it's easy to see you put a lot of work into it. Ever since I tried FlashNSF and the projects at hkpr.info (which you're also aware of), I've been hoping someone would make an accessible GME applet for browsers. I have to admit I'm a little disappointed that the app you've created is Chrome-specific and has to be installed, but I understand the reasons and the site you've set up is pretty wonderful. This is really great, something I've been waiting for a long time. Thank you.
If you do add support for VGMstream, you might want to start with the gradual introduction of DS/Saturn stuff, and Sega CD/Turbo CD when you expand into that. PS1 XA and Dreamcast and so on can get pretty large (not to mention resource intensive), and while bandwidth might not be a problem now, it's always hard to predict how long that will be true.
Once again, thank you very much for this! I wish I had half this much dedication to seeing a project through.
@Dais!: Thanks for the feedback. I have received some comments that I should have done this all in "HTML5" so that it would be accessible in all browsers on all platforms. Obviously, that sounds nice but it's not really plausible right now. The best I can do is go with the NaCl approach and make it as simple as possible to install (2 clicks from the player page and the music starts).
Wow, that updated VGM format looks fierce. Really, though, I just need to know 2 things: 1) Where can I find a bit of open source code that plays a format; and 2) Where can I find an organized archive of (preferably metadata-rich) chiptunes in that format?
Umm, you don't seem to have all the Dreamcast games I've ripped, I wanted to give a listen to Dreamcast version of Shiren, and it doesn't seem to be there.
The Dreamcast situation: I got the entire DSF archive from ftp.modland.com (137 titles) and ran them through an automated process to add them to the site. However, my process rejected all but about 50 of them due to a severe lack of metadata.
Then I learned of dsf.joshw.info. I had a specific request for Skies of Arcadia. I tried to add that but found a bug in my automated process.
So it's on my list to get all the archives from dsf.joshw.info (I trust they have better metadata than modland?) and fix my import process.
And, yeah, you discovered my severe weakness regarding non-English languages and characters. :-)