Some thoughts on sound emulation

[brubo]

Back in 2004 the winamp plugin "64th note" was released . It allowed the playback of nintendo 64 music in winamp (USF files ripped from the roms).
This plugin was based on Project64 1.6 by Zilmar and Jabo and Azimer's HLE Audio Plugin.

Recently I came across a similar plugin that does the same for gamecube music. It's called "in_cube". It can play the soundtracks of Wind waker, Twilght princess, Eternal Darkness, Metroid prime 1, 2 (and even 3!), F-zero GX, and many, many more. None of these games have working sound in Dolphin. Maybe someone with technical understanding should check out the source and see if it could be of any use for Dolphin?

 

[biolizard89]

Back in 2004 the winamp plugin "64th note" was released . It allowed the playback of nintendo 64 music in winamp (USF files ripped from the roms).
This plugin was based on Project64 1.6 by Zilmar and Jabo and Azimer's HLE Audio Plugin.

Recently I came across a similar plugin that does the same for gamecube music. It's called "in_cube". It can play the soundtracks of Wind waker, Twilght princess, Eternal Darkness, Metroid prime 1, 2 (and even 3!), F-zero GX, and many, many more. None of these games have working sound in Dolphin. Maybe someone with technical understanding should check out the source and see if it could be of any use for Dolphin?

(I'm not an expert here, so take whatever I say as the word of an idiot...)

64th Note directly emulates the N64. in_cube, however, does not emulate the GameCube; it reverse-engineered the format of the sound files sitting on the GameCube disc, and plays them without emulating the GameCube hardware. As such, a true emulator wouldn't be able to use in_cube to emulate the GameCube sound hardware. However, it probably is possible to use a hack so that Dolphin can detect that the game is trying to play a sound file supported by in_cube, and have Dolphin play that file using the in_cube code. Not a particularly clean method, but it's possible. In fact, I think I remember reading (not sure on this) that this is what Dolphin does now with the games that have sound; it just doesn't yet support all of the file types that in_cube supports.

So yeah, I think it's possible to further hack Dolphin to handle the rest of the in_cube-compatible audio, but I suspect that it's a low priority for the dev team.

(Remember, I'm an idiot, so I may be mistaken...)