Oerg866's Echo Player + New Song :)

[Oerg866]

Good day people

I'm kind of excited right now. A wihle back I was like, "Hey I want to do an Echo Player ROM like I did with SMPS back then (and also with Echo as a proof of concept like a year ago or so)". I decided to write everything from scratch (something I've not done before :P), including the most basic framework and low-level stuff. It turned out to be a fun project, of which I recorded most of the development.

I have tried to design a "player", with the graphics that represent 80s-era HiFi-equipment. I'm no artist, but I think it turned out quite nice. I composed a new song for this project, and it shows the potential of Echo and my tool xm2esf.

Echo information & downloads

Making of, Part 1
Making of, Part 2
Making of, Part 3
Making of, Part 4
Making of, Part 5
Making of, Part 6
Making of, The end

Download the ROM

The song is called "Blast" and is by far the song I made for this machine that I took the most time on. I hope you enjoy it all feedback is welcome, be it for the player or the song.

As soon as I finish implementing all the other things I had in mind, I'll post the source so you can make your own things with it

Cheers,
Oerg866

[sega16]

Wow this is great. I think echo will get rid of smps for good because it runs on the z80 and smps runs on 68k so echo will not use vblank time and it supports xm effects unlike smps so we might as well say goodby to smps.Also cool player.

[Sik]

I think echo will get rid of smps for good because it runs on the z80 and smps runs on 68k

Well, there are SMPS variants that run on the Z80 alone, just not the one being used around by hackers. I'd still want Echo to get rid of SMPS anyways because using SMPS without a license from Sega is copyright infringement and also because Echo is more sane to setup than SMPS...

it supports xm effects unlike smps

Actually it doesn't per-se, the effects are processed by the converter tool which then generates the appropriate events for Echo, although I'll most likely add an arpeggio event for Project MD just to bring down the size of some BGMs... but not for Echo 1.0 (I need it for other thing right now). Project MD will most likely be Echo 1.1 instead.

[sega16]

well either way echo is better than smps

[Anonymouse]

I totally love this. What you have done is great. Well Done!!

[bgvanbur]

Very nice, I think this will be very useful for homebrew.

[Chilly Willy]

Very nice, I think this will be very useful for homebrew.

Tru-dat! I've been asked a number of times to add some music handling to my homebrew examples, but I'm not much of a music guy. I'll probably just work in the Echo player to my own stuff!

[Sik]

Very nice, I think this will be very useful for homebrew.

That was the whole point of it =P

Eh, I was trying to look around a license, and I want Echo to be free but I want to make its license permissive just to spread it as much as possible (I think the only other proper homebrew sound engine is TMSE and the license for that is much more restrictive). What do people think about zlib's license?

BTW: to make it clear (just in case), Echo isn't limited to that style of music. The instruments you use have a lot of influence in the outcome. That's the artist's job, not the sound engine's. So yeah, Echo should be quite versatile in that sense.

EDIT: and also to make it clear, the big "DO NOT USE" in the readme in GitHub is not legal binding. It's just a generic warning that Echo is still in development so you shouldn't rely on it for anything serious yet.

[Oerg866]

Thanks guys

Yes, I always do music in this style, because i love it so much myself.... And...well... Echo is pretty stable by now =P

[Chilly Willy]

I think most devs understand the difference between being warned that a given library might be buggy versus being restricted in what you can use it in. I'm pretty happy with most "library" licenses, but if you actually used LGPL, be sure to add the static linking clause so that situations where static linking is mandatory ("old" consoles or computers) don't have to worry about that old argument of whether LGPL alone covers static linking or not.

[Sik]

I think most devs understand the difference between being warned that a given library might be buggy versus being restricted in what you can use it in.

Problem being that it's technically possible to argue it's legal binding, especially when the proper license file still isn't up yet.

I'm pretty happy with most "library" licenses, but if you actually used LGPL, be sure to add the static linking clause so that situations where static linking is mandatory ("old" consoles or computers) don't have to worry about that old argument of whether LGPL alone covers static linking or not.

Even if I do that exception clause (FLTK does it, although only as long as you don't modify the source code), I can't use the LGPL anyways because it still explicitly requires the program to state it's using the library and to provide its copyright and its shortened license notice. This makes sense for programs that have an "about" dialog, but games rarely do, and I doubt the credits are going to be considered valid for this purpose (since often you're forced to finish the game to get there). Also I'm expecting most homebrew to be standalone ROMs, without any documentation.

In fact, for the very same reason I can't use the BSD license either (which is what I was originally gonna use). That's why I said I'd probably use zlib's, since that doesn't require the program to have the notice (only its source code).

EDIT: this got me wondering how this affects games that are themselves GPL, now that I come to think about it... Maybe I should ask the FSF on that topic. In any case I'm still sticking to the zlib license for Echo, I guess >_>' Any complaints about using zlib?

[bgvanbur]

Even if I do that exception clause (FLTK does it, although only as long as you don't modify the source code), I can't use the LGPL anyways because it still explicitly requires the program to state it's using the library and to provide its copyright and its shortened license notice. This makes sense for programs that have an "about" dialog, but games rarely do, and I doubt the credits are going to be considered valid for this purpose (since often you're forced to finish the game to get there). Also I'm expecting most homebrew to be standalone ROMs, without any documentation.

It sucks that even for Sega CD homebrew you can't just throw the license on the file system since many licenses require the program to display it. Hope you guys pick an easy to use license

[Sik]

Now that you mention CD, that reminds me, Echo doesn't work there >.>' The Z80 can't access MCD hardware (not even the work RAM), nor it can read MD RAM, essentially leaving it unable to access anything. Though luck =/

Echo sorta works on the 32X, but I didn't bother testing it there so I'm not sure. Basically, it supports working with 32X addresses (so it will work on 32X games), but it won't make any use of 32X-specific hardware (so you're stuck with YM2612+PSG). Granted, several 32X games completely ignored the PWM hardware anyways. Also note Echo won't do ROM bank switching, so you need to ensure sound is always available to it (probably by putting all sound data in the first 512KB of ROM, so the 68000 can do bank switching freely).

[Chilly Willy]

Even if I do that exception clause (FLTK does it, although only as long as you don't modify the source code), I can't use the LGPL anyways because it still explicitly requires the program to state it's using the library and to provide its copyright and its shortened license notice. This makes sense for programs that have an "about" dialog, but games rarely do, and I doubt the credits are going to be considered valid for this purpose (since often you're forced to finish the game to get there). Also I'm expecting most homebrew to be standalone ROMs, without any documentation.

In fact, for the very same reason I can't use the BSD license either (which is what I was originally gonna use). That's why I said I'd probably use zlib's, since that doesn't require the program to have the notice (only its source code).

That's why the updated BSD license removed the "advertising" clause. That made it more popular as a license. It's commonly called the Modified BSD license.

EDIT: Also, the LGPL only requires a program to show the license IF it shows a copyright notice screen as part of its execution.

For a Combined Work that displays copyright notices during execution, include the copyright notice for the Library among these notices, as well as a reference directing the user to the copies of the GNU GPL and this license document.

Otherwise, it would just be included with any written literature or readme files. Of course, if all you had was just a rom image file, that probably wouldn't be compliant.

EDIT: this got me wondering how this affects games that are themselves GPL, now that I come to think about it... Maybe I should ask the FSF on that topic. In any case I'm still sticking to the zlib license for Echo, I guess >_>' Any complaints about using zlib?

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

I like that link - it gives compatible and incompatible licenses along with a brief comment on the licenses.

The zlib license is GPL compatible... it's a nice license for a library, so I have no complaints.

[Sik]

I was talking about the copyright notice, not license compatibility XD