Combining Music and Sound Effects

[Gemini]

Right off the bat, I've already converted all the Atari 2600 sound types into samples and am using them in my music tracking software to come up with some music for my game ideas. However, I'm at a loss as to how to mesh both the music and sound effects together.

 

I have three thoughts on how to accomplish this, and am wondering which would work best:

 

1. Mesh the sound effects between music notes, temporarily degrading music and sound quality but allowing a sound effect to be played simultaneously.

 

2. Override a music channel to allow the sound to play. Thus, while a sound effect plays, it takes over one of the sound channels, but no degredataion of quality takes place... though for a brief moment, half the music is missing.

 

3. Either of the above methods, but have the sound effect switch which channel it's playing on every or every other frame.

 

I know there's already music code out there, such as Paul Slocum's music kit, (the music in his game Marble Craze has been my inspiration for doing Atari 2600 music), but I'm the kind of programmer who likes to do everything from scratch.

Edited January 21, 2008 by Gemini

[vdub_bobby]

What I've done is to steal a channel from the music to play the sound effects. If the sound effects are loud and relatively short, then I don't think anyone will notice that half the music cuts out. Actually, in Elevators Amiss not only did I steal a channel for the sound effect (stair climbing) but I also muted the other channel (that was still playing music). In retrospect, though, I think that was overkill.

 

EDIT: I think method's 1 and 2 will sound bad, though it probably depends on the specifics. Drastically changing the sound channels every frame (as in method #3) will probably introduce some weird effects, also.

Edited January 16, 2008 by vdub_bobby