Comment by qrmn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qrmn | Hacker News Reader

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Fascinating insights.

Lots of music on the PSX used a system like that, because that's a very natural fit for the PSX SPU. Tracker "modules" combine the sample data and tabulated sequencing data, but what you found more often on the PSX was separate sample wavetables and sequencing data closer to (i.e. literally converted from, and convertible back to) a MIDI format: it's smaller, timing-based, without all those pesky 00s wasting space. (It sounds better with the PSX reverb unit/buffer on top, of course.) It's actually very similar to what Minoru Akao did for the AKAO sound engine for the PSX Final Fantasy games, for example.

What did you think of the multi-tasking kernel/DMA bit in the "main" binary? (Or did you just remove that?)

By the way, the VR missions mentioned above were released as a separate add-on disc in many regions (rather than the later release Integral which the PC port was). If you do happen to have an original and can't play it on a PS2/PS3 because it doesn't recognise that the 'lid' is open (because it's a tray/slot-loader)... try launching the other executable, it runs fine :)

I don't rememmber a lot of it.

Konami were very late with delivering their (MTS?) system that was their audio/tasking thing, we were not given anything in advance. As such we've just found in the code where the samples and music had to be played, and as I've said above we "stole" (downloaded) the music data from the web-sites that had them (not sure how they've got all the effects, or it could be that we also found some waveforms in the source package).

I think at some point the "radio-codec" (okay, that's the actual Radio that Snake talks to the others) used this system - maybe a bit like fibers/threads, when a message comes, then switches. I'm not sure what exactly I did, and how much I understood it well (threads/fibers were not my thing back then... that much) but we've got it working.

I do remember disassembling it and looking at it from the other way! (I was curious.) Pre-emptive multi-tasking kernels at that level weren't things you saw frequently on consoles then. Many people just hung things off the vertical blank instead.

You can decode the audio bits - it's just Sony's special version of ADPCM - or use a cartridge (for those PlayStations old enough to have a cartridge port) and read out the SPU memory over X-Link. You didn't even need a debug model to do it (although you did need a handy parallel port and the ability to bit-bang, or run a DOS program).

The CODEC used CD-XA Mode 2 Form 2 (2532-byte sector, with less error-correction layers) ADPCM-compressed streaming audio, 1 of 8 channels, at a relatively low sample rate - which works fine for speech. Lots of PlayStation games used the same basic technique for music and voices (as well as FMVs, although the bulk of that data would have been MDEC-compressed video).

I've got more familiar later with PS2, as I move to another studio, and was an audio programmer there (Treyarch) and had to do a lot of "PS1" programming on the SPU. I was later reading an article on the TRON operating systems, and found that a lot of the primitives on the PS2 were based on it, even the scheduler to the point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project - but never got much of it.

Oh, these were some exciting times! - the whole systems was there open for you to see (at least from the software level, and to some point HW).

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