Panned Sound Effects for Super Mario World™

Have you ever played a hack, heard a sound effect and wondered "wow I wonder where's that coming from haha", or have you ever just played Megaman X and liked how its sound effects came from different directions? ...no? ...oh okay.

...fear no more! this patch does just that!
The way this works is that whenever a sound effect is sent to the sound driver to be played, an optional second byte can be sent along with it which specifies its direction, when the sound driver (AMK) receives a sound effect, it also checks if a second "panning" byte came along with it, if it did, it'll recalculate its volume and pan it automatically, this means that it's compatible with both mono and stereo sound effects, vanilla or custom. All of this allows for a more "immersive" experience, perfect for more ambient-ish or spooky hacks.


Example video showcasing most vanilla SMW sound effects.

DOWNLOAD


Current limitations:
-Multiple sprites that play sound effects at the same time (chucks, grinders) will only have the panning from the most recent sprite.
-No perfectly centered panning.

The latter can be easily implemented, I'm just burned out from this patch. The former is more complicated though, as it would require checking which sprites are playing sound effects in the current frame and averaging their positions, and also checking if a newer, different sound effect was played in the same port (essentially overwritting everything).

Note that this requires a lot of wrappers so that it works with vanilla sprites, blocks and the player, therefore it needs free or unused space in banks 0 through 3 and because of this it may be incompatible with some resources, however, this can be changed through the defines included in the .asm file.

interesting!

Crazy stuff! Listening to the video with headphones on tickled my ears a little bit. 🤭

I remember seeing progress of this patch on the Discord and being so impressed by it. Even now that remains true! It's cool to know how it works too, I feel like this will pave the way for unique gimmicks and more immersive experiences, like you said.

Thank you for making this, Pinci!

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What is a Lunar Magic, and can I eat it?

This is really impressive work! On a base level it's just a really neat little thing, but it does become very useful when things like the snake block sprites or bullet bill spawners are involved. Having some kind of an audio cue to point at a direction is extremely convenient.

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Other Submissions of mine!

This reminds me a lot of the final level of Castlevania: Bloodlines, where you need to take attention to the panning. So you know from which direction the running armors are coming from.

This asm has really great potential. I love it.

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A new sound driver feature, I see! You've got my curiosity.

Terrific Audio Driver has native support for this, now that I think of it, but I decided to see how you modified the protocol on the SPC side to be able to do this, as it's not native to AddmusicK itself or the original sound driver. For me, it's important to do a comparison between the two, because I've been wrecking havoc with quite a few other AddmusicK modifiers when I upgraded the entire tool from 1.0.8 to 1.0.9 due to all the shuffling and optimizing that I did (meaning that swapping ASM files is not as simple), and I know this was made for AddmusicK 1.0.11. Good thing I have git grep for this kind of stuff so that I can just simply look at what was changed.

I came to the conclusion that you modified $2142/$F6's input in order to do that via a negative value. Subsequently, I'm taking note that this is going to be a case where the user may end up having to pick what features they actually want... because I used the same negative values in a pull request of mine on the AddmusicKFF repo to fade the global volume to any value desired (global volume ≠ song volume, as I used a separate scaler to avoid a conflict).

And naturally, adding something new to the SPC side does mean you'll have to take a small hit as far as what songs you can actually use (meaning if your songs are stuffing ARAM with either unoptimized/large song data, large sample/echo buffer usage, or a combination of all of those, then it could be rendered incompatible without some optimizations and/or modifications). This is an addition to the ASM filesize of the SPC program, meaning it must be permanently allocated at compile time, and is the exact reason why I decided to avoid making AddmusicK 1.0.9 and subsequent versions any larger than AddmusicK 1.0.8's ASM filesize in its stock form.

Thanks everyone for the kind reception!
I've also updated the readme file because I forgot to include instructions on how to use the routine lol, here they are anyway in case of cache shenanigans:
Collapsed text: Show/Hide

Call the routine with the 16-bit position stored in A, it will output the panning value in the same register and then store it to "!APU00Pan" for sound effects in 1DF9 and "!APU03Pan" for 1DFC.

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I actually modified both $2141 and $2142, this is so that 1DF9 and 1DFC don't overwrite each other's panning values.


I'm aware of this, it isn't meant to be a permanent addition to AddmusicK (as in, to be included in an official update), it's just an option for others to use

First thought: new sound effects so bad they were panned by critics?
Second though: Sound effects that make me wonder where they're coming from? How bad are they gonna be?
Third thought: Oh, did you port Megeman sound effects to SMW?

Fourth though, much later: ...oh it's the stereo SFX I saw you post on Discord a while ago. Even then it took me a while to figure out what was even different (no fault of yours, I'm probably just not enough of an audiophile or my speakers aren't far enough apart).

This is super neat!

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This is one of those things that I didn't even know was a thing I could want lmao, but now that I see it, I realize how cool it is and I'm happy it exists. It's such a subtle thing, and yet I feel like it'll add greatly to the experience of playing the game!


I like this idea.

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