Please Help With Famitracker txt

Hello all

So I am making an an adventure game, and I must admit, I may have gotten a little bit carried away with the soundtrack. I made a lot of songs, and my biggest fear came true-- the file is just too big, and NESMaker can't handle it. I tried removing some songs, but it still wouldn't work-- even when I was removing much more than I'd have liked to. It was clear that it simply wasn't going to work unless I started removing essential tracks.

Please tell me, is there any possible way at all, to either compress the famitracker file even more so that it fits, or make NESMaker able to handle a bigger file? I poured a lot of work into the music I made for my game and I'd be really heartbroken if I had to throw that work away because of this limitation.

I've included the file in case anybody would like to have a look at it. Many thanks!

Perhaps you could "compress" your musical ideas into less pieces? For example, you could merge the inside variations with their respective regular versions.

TakuikaNinja said:

Perhaps you could "compress" your musical ideas into less pieces? For example, you could merge the inside variations with their respective regular versions.

Click to expand...

Sadly, I don't think that will work The songs are wildly different from each-other, and wouldn't blend well.

Are you using the same instruments for the different songs? Would that help to reduce the size much if you were able to limit them?

Perhaps theres a way to use other available space by having the file split into two? Would need some advanced ASM guru magic on that.

The only other thing I can think of is having a part 1 and a part 2 to your game.

Jonny said:

Are you using the same instruments for the different songs? Would that help to reduce the size much if you were able to limit them?

Perhaps theres a way to use other available space by having the file split into two? Would need some advanced ASM guru magic on that.

The only other thing I can think of is having a part 1 and a part 2 to your game.

Click to expand...

Note data takes up much more space in the ROM than instrument data, so reducing the amount of instruments in the instrument bank wouldn't help too much.

Having over 30 songs is way too big of a musical scope for a NESmaker game. Heck, even for a NES game in general. Many games can fill up the music bank with half that amount of songs alone. Mystic Searches now uses 2 banks for music data from what I've heard, but there's no easy solution for NESmaker use.

Personally my real answer would to be reduce the scope of the soundtrack. Much of NES development is all about compromise.

CutterCross said:

Jonny said:

Are you using the same instruments for the different songs? Would that help to reduce the size much if you were able to limit them?

Perhaps theres a way to use other available space by having the file split into two? Would need some advanced ASM guru magic on that.

The only other thing I can think of is having a part 1 and a part 2 to your game.

Click to expand...

Note data takes up much more space in the ROM than instrument data, so reducing the amount of instruments in the instrument bank wouldn't help too much.

Having over 30 songs is way too big of a musical scope for a NESmaker game. Heck, even for a NES game in general. Many games can fill up the music bank with half that amount of songs alone. Mystic Searches now uses 2 banks for music data from what I've heard, but there's no easy solution for NESmaker use.

Personally my real answer would to be reduce the scope of the soundtrack. Much of NES development is all about compromise.

Click to expand...

Ah-- I was afraid that might be the answer. Still, if anyone has a solution for me, please leave a reply.

CutterCross said:

Jonny said:

Are you using the same instruments for the different songs? Would that help to reduce the size much if you were able to limit them?

Perhaps theres a way to use other available space by having the file split into two? Would need some advanced ASM guru magic on that.

The only other thing I can think of is having a part 1 and a part 2 to your game.

Click to expand...

Note data takes up much more space in the ROM than instrument data, so reducing the amount of instruments in the instrument bank wouldn't help too much.

Having over 30 songs is way too big of a musical scope for a NESmaker game. Heck, even for a NES game in general. Many games can fill up the music bank with half that amount of songs alone. Mystic Searches now uses 2 banks for music data from what I've heard, but there's no easy solution for NESmaker use.

Personally my real answer would to be reduce the scope of the soundtrack. Much of NES development is all about compromise.

Click to expand...

So I ended up opting to make my game a two-parter, I effectively cut the soundtrack in half but now I get this error when I try to export.

"C:\Users\hello\Documents\NESmaker_4_1_5\GameEngineData>asm6 MainASM.nes game.nes demo.txt
pass 1..
GameData\DataBank01_Includes.asm(28): Can't open file.
demo.txt written."

What's wrong and how do I fix it?

EDIT: Solved issue. It was unrelated.

CutterCross said:

Mystic Searches now uses 2 banks for music data from what I've heard, but there's no easy solution for NESmaker use.

Click to expand...

Does the music file have to be stored in the same bank as ggsound for it to work, or could you switch banks and switch back?

Elarath said:

CutterCross said:

Mystic Searches now uses 2 banks for music data from what I've heard, but there's no easy solution for NESmaker use.

Click to expand...

Does the music file have to be stored in the same bank as ggsound for it to work, or could you switch banks and switch back?

Click to expand...

Technically, no, but ggsound and your music data do need to be loaded at the same time, so having them in the same bank is a very practical way of doing that. Theoretically, if you were to make enough room in the static bank to hold ggsound, you could move ggsound there and that would give you a bit more room in the sound bank for some more music. GGsound uses close to 1/5th of a bank. To go even further with theorizing, you might be able to have ggsound in the static bank and have multiple banks for sound data, but I have no idea how much management code you would have to write to get that to work.

With the current version of nesmaker, I think it is possible for someone who knows their way around the code to make room for ggsound in the static bank. I'm pretty close to freeing that much, but that's not why I am freeing up space. That said, at this point you might want to wait and see what's up with the next version for something like that since I beleive Joe said he was freeing up space in the static bank.