How to create a game rom

[Desbo4268]

Hi all, As the title says, I'm looking to get into sega megadrive development, I know a little bit of 68k just enough to be dangerous! I know that I will need to design backgrounds and sprites however the thing that escapes me is the audio.
Do I create separate audio tracks/sfx in a specific format and build the rom to include them or is all the sound generated by code?
Also once I'm happy with my code what is the best program to use to create the rom.
Any response will be appreciated,
thanks again.

[Stef]

SGDK can help you to create all that easily, using WAV file for playing SFX and VGM file for music

[Desbo4268]

Brilliant! Thanks so much for the reply, I've seen SGDK hosted in a few different locations, where is the best/official place to get the latest versions?
I'm just trying to get everything in order before I devote a ton of time in creating something only to find I can't finish it.

I'll have to start a seperate topic on any sound questions I have, this is getting exciting!!!

[Stef]

Just here : https://stephane-d.github.io/SGDK/

[Desbo4268]

Awesome, thanks. I'll have a look after work.

[Sik]

Note to self: figure out how to get a good YM2612 emu/simulator without legal issues so I can make an Echo tracker.

[cero]

Not another tracker, pls

One with notation interface instead?

[Stef]

Sik> Is the one from Gens not usable for that ? I wrote it and i really don't mind that you use it for whatever you want... it is not 100% accurate but with some quick and easy fixes it could be good enough i guess.

[Desbo4268]

I've looked into a few different ways of creating audio now and from what I can see its going to be an absolute nightmare!
Saying that though everyone here seems to be very helpful, so i'm going to press on.
with regards to SGDK How many people are working on it? i'm sure with some of the minds we have on this forum development could be sped up with some good communication and free time even if its just fine tuning.
What do you think?

[Stef]

A nightmare really ?
With SGDK you have different possibilities to have music & SFX in your game :
- Echo sound driver
- VGM sound driver
- XGM sound driver
- 2/4 PCM channels sound driver.

I recommend you the XGM sound driver as it's able to play .VGM file (as the VGM driver) while allowing 4 PCM channels (you can reserve 3 of them for SFX). You can find many existing .vgm files for Megadrive music but you can build your owns with music tracker tools as Deflemask or VGMMaker.
For SFX, you can just use plain WAV files, does that sound that difficult ?

[Desbo4268]

Thanks for all the info, I actually had a look at Deflemask and it seems to be pretty user friendly.
Im going to try and put a decent bit of code together and when the time comes I will definitely be asking for your help, thanks again for the reply, im actually having a play with SGDK this weekend so hopefully i can get a little bit more familiar with it.

[mikejmoffitt]

I am going to agree that the current audio situation is a nightmare because while the many engines available now support sound effects, none of them support multiple synthesized SFX playing at a time.

[cero]

..and none of them have good tools to create music, either. A Windows-only tracker is not "good".

[Stef]

I am going to agree that the current audio situation is a nightmare because while the many engines available now support sound effects, none of them support multiple synthesized SFX playing at a time.

Synthesized SFX are imo not good anyway... it's quite rare you want to use FM for SFX. PSG would even be a better choice for that.

[Natsumi]

Then you have S3K. Amazing music, amazing sound effects, uses PCM only for music. If you know how to make good sound effects, you can easily synthesize them. Plus you spend fraction of ROM space on sound effects that sound often better than PCM.