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PCE/tech: Chiptune Tutorial: PC Engine music via HuSIC on Mac OS X

trevor w. — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:49:41 -0500

HuSIC is a version of the well-known ppmckc MML compiler that's been customized to produce music for the PC Engine/Turbo Grafx-16's sound hardware instead of the NES/Famicom. I've had a request for a tutorial on getting HuSIC working on Mac OS X. Thanks to some fantastic tools by boukichi, the process is easier than it used to be, but tracking down all the relevant pieces and configuring them can be a hassle. So, I sat down to lay out how to get everything up and running. This is a first draft, so if anything is unclear or just doesn't work, let me know and I'll fix it up.

Download the latest version of HuSIC (mirror) and extract it somewhere sensible, like, say, your home directory (for example, /Users/your name/husic026osx).

Download ezMML (mirror), extract the archive, and copy it into your Applications folder.

Open up the songs folder in your HuSIC folder, and open the script named make_hes.sh. This is the script that will take your MML text file and eventually spit out a complete HES music file. You'll notice a lot of relative paths in the script. These will have to be changed to absolute paths in order for the script to work with ezMML. To fix this, you can download my custom make_hes.sh and replace the existing file in the songs directory.

Open up this new script and look for the line that says export HUSIC="/Users/your name/husic026osx". Change the path in this line to point to the folder where you placed HuSIC.

The last line of my custom script will open the generated HES file in whatever player you have associated with HES files. Recent builds of the all-around lovely multi-format music player Cog support HES, so I recommend grabbing that.

To associate your HES files with Cog, right-click on any given HES file, click Get Info, select Cog from the Open With drop-down box, click Change All, and then click Continue when the confirmation dialog comes up.

Finally, you need to configure ezMML to use your custom make_hes.sh and run HuSIC. Start ezMML and open the Preferences menu. You'll see a dialog that looks like this:

In the config name field, enter HuSIC (HES). Click the "..." box next to the filename field and browse to the custom make_hes.sh script that you've configured. Click the Add button, and then click OK.

Finally, once you've got a masterpiece MML composition ready to go, pull down the box that says ppmck (Internal) and select HuSIC (HES). Click Compile and you're off and running!

If you're looking to start from the beginning at composing for the PC Engine, you can take a look at Neonemypr's Ultimate PPMCK Reference and Tutorial, which is focused on MML coding for NES/Famicom, but the vast majority of the commands will work in HuSIC. For a list of the additional commands you'll need to use (especially the @WTxx wavetable definitions), open up hmckc.txt in the docs folder of your HuSIC folder. For some example HuSIC MML code, you can check out Rophon's site or Zero.

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MULTI/news: Release: dive

trevor w. — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:17:39 -0500

Here's my entry for kokoromi's gamma 256 competition. dive is a simple action game with an undersea theme. It won't take you long to play, and the download is small. I've compiled versions for both Windows XP and Mac OS X (universal). Have a look. I'll scare up a postmortem in the next day or so.

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NON/tech: Development log: Rambling about chiptunes

trevor w. — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 01:00:49 -0500

Not many updates lately, thanks to lots of work and little time to write.

Plus, I've been dusting off an old game project that I mean to finish this time. It's that clone of Heiankyo Alien I've talked about on the site before. I could take a screenshot, but I'm not quite comfortable with the graphics yet. I'm aiming to build all parts of the game myself - design, code, graphics, music, sound effects. Which is tricky for me, because I'm pretty much a straight-up developer. I don't have much experience with art or music composition (despite having spent years playing the violin and viola).

So, today I want to talk about music.

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XBOX/review: Xbox quickie: Still Life

trevorw — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:19:41 -0500

Still Life was a 2005 Adventure Company release developed by Microïds, who are best known for Syberia and Amerzone. It's a whodunit with two playable characters: an FBI agent in Chicago, and the agent's grandfather, a private dick working in Prague in the 1920s.

The game certainly has its strengths. All of its best puzzles revolve around forensic investigation using each character's particular skills and tools, and the investigation itself is pretty satisfying. The story switches gracefully between settings per chapter, and the prerendered backgrounds are all nicely rendered. The leads and a few of the supporting characters are quite well-developed, and the story features many strong female characters (including the FBI agent lead).

But the game falls on its face due to too many design compromises and failures in execution. The voicework is uneven, and the very Canadian actors have a difficult time pulling off the very American - and Czech - characters' accents. This game contains the very worst African American vernacular and Chicano accents I have ever heard - and the characters that use them aren't so hot, either. The puzzles that aren't directly related to investigation tend to ride the line of being irrelevant gadget affairs. While the game plays itself pretty straight and realistic for the majority of the game, the action-suspense-cop-movie cliches and... liberal interpretations of FBI operations pile up so quickly in the last two chapters that it becomes very difficult to take the game seriously.

Still Life is the second in a planned trilogy, and while you don't have to play the prequel Post Mortem to enjoy the game, the story's conclusion is a different matter. See, this is a murder mystery, but the developers thought it'd be a good idea to save the big reveal until the next game. That game has yet to be announced, and it most likely will never be, as Microïds' Canadian branch was bought out by Ubisoft just before the release of Still Life. (Recalls Beyond Good & Evil, doesn't it?) This game has no payoff. You simply don't find out who the killer is, and the game keeps nearly all of its suspects tantalizingly ambiguous. I've heard a lot of complaints about similar cliffhanger endings lately, but this one takes the cake.

I wanted to be able to recommend this, but I just can't, with the way it shoots itself in the foot.

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XBOX/article: Influences and accessibility in Tomb Raider: Legend

trevorw — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:16:28 -0500

It's always fun to pick a console's remains after its death for cheap goodies that are worth playing. The original Xbox has hit this sweet spot, and as I still have a perfectly-functioning black box, I don't have to worry about backwards-compatibility issues. I've been rifling through the budget bins with a taste for Western titles with good writing and an adventure bent. The first of these I've finished is Tomb Raider Legend.

Before Legend came out, there was a lot of speculation that it would be the game to save the series after Core Design's bumblings, and it had a lot to live up to. Clearly, it was successful. Since I'm only just now playing the game, after all its promises have been fulfilled, I can thankfully evaluate it on its own merits.

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