Game Gear channels

Entry posted by atari2600land April 11, 2018

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So I have been busy again with the Game Gear game tonight after sleeping almost all day. One of the things I wanted to do is have a sfx play on channel 2, since it isn't used in the song. But I tried and kept trying because I thought I wasn't doing anything wrong. Frustrated, it dawned on me: Since channel 2 had no data in the song (channels 1 and 0 did), it must be silent all the time. But why, I wondered, could I write data to channel 3 and have that work?

So anyway, I tried my best to make a shooting sound effect with channel 3. And when the time comes to have it hit an enemy, I'll have to switch channel 3's noise from a shooting to an explosion when the enemy gets hit. I was going to have channel 2 be the shooting sound effect and channel 3 be the explosion, but that isn't going to work apparently. I'm using the PSGLib library for music, so essentially I write a song using a program called Mod2PSG, then convert it to data the PSGLib library can read and then make on the Game Gear.

And now that it's become apparent channel 2 isn't doing anything, I can now use it in the song. I did have a basic song, with singular notes, channel 0 was treble and channel 1 was bass. But now I can use channel 2. But since the song sounds so good now, I'll just keep what I have and remember that I have 3 channels to compose the song for level 2.

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