What did Nintendo musicians use to make their music for the NES? Nowadays, video game music is actual music recorded from instruments, or MIDI sound, but back then in the NES days, the NES had 5 sound channels (plus more for the FDS, etc). The NES had 2 Square Waves, a Pulse, a Noise, and DMC (Wave Data) channels. There are many tools that can create these tunes into .ned or .nsf (Nintendo Sound Files) which is music data extracted from an NES cart/rom, but the developers back in the day must have used a different method. Does anybody have any idea what kind of development hardware/software they used to create such catchy tunes?
they used programmers from what I've heard. but there must have existed tools to aid in the music creation too
Most just used that thing called assembly language. The (p)APU is running in series with the CPU, sadly a song can't just get DMA'd over to the APU and ran, the program code actually has to play it instruction by instruction. How games play music is up to the game, but many do store the music in sequence like a NSF and play segments during the game's NMI routine since it's the only real way to achieve consistant timing. If you're interested in making tunes today, you're far better off than developers of the past. Now there are NES trackers and MCK for the lovely MML language. See NESDev and 2a03.org
Various musicians used various techniques, but in the early days, would have typed in the data in numerical format (pitch, duration) similar to this - .db 47,25, 49,25, 50,25, 52,25, etc. You could convert your music from a musical score by using tables (or calculations) to find number required for specific pitches. The instrument settings were usually obtained by playing with the ADSR and source settings. Later on, there were tools available that could convert from midi, or trackers (simple step sequencers). Some programmers/companies made their own utilities.
