Seeking consulting on WonderSwan music driver/tracker development
I've been working on a WonderSwan C development toolchain called "Wonderful" for the past 1-2 years.
One of the things the platform could really use is a music driver/tracker - converted VGM files have filesize and technical issues. As such, understanding that my time available to work on a niche homebrew toolchain is limited, I've been considering adapting hUGEDriver/hUGETracker to the WonderSwan as part of my toolchain work. The reasoning behind such a choice is:
(a) The tracker in question has very permissive licensing, which I hope to retain.
(b) hUGEDriver is a popular design in the GB homebrew game development space, though this is probably in part due to the availability of an actual frontend...
(c) The GB and Swan share a lot of similar audio concepts. This means most of the frontend GUI code can be reused or easily adapted.
(d) Any frontend improvements can trickle back into upstream and help the larger GB community, which is a cool side benefit.
However, I can't do this alone - I'm a coder, hardly a musician (though I'd like to learn more about composing one day)... To borrow a term, I need a "product owner" of sorts - someone who has experience with chiptune creation from the musician side of things (especially across a range of platforms) and is willing to:
(a) answer annoying questions about their development needs, particularly in terms of the driver's capabilities and performance compromises,
(b) hopefully actually use the thing so I can see how well it can sing!
I'm in Poland, so a GMT+1-2 timezone. I speak English and Polish, but I don't mind with working from people around the world - as consulting work, I expect it to be highly asynchronous. No deadlines, as I'm not doing this with a specific demo or party in mind.
To provide some context: the WonderSwan's sound hardware is:
- four channels, mixed digitally at 24,000 Hz in 10-bit stereo (8-bit mono for internal speaker output),
- 15 volume steps, independently controlled across the left and right channel,
- all four channels can be used to play 32x4-bit wavetable samples,
- channel 2 can optionally be used to play 8-bit digital PCM audio instead of wavetable (but this would be a post-MVP feature for various reasons),
- channel 3 can do frequency sweeps in hardware,
- channel 4 can optionally be used to play LFSR-generated noise instead of wavetable.
For the curious, technical/programming documentation is available here: ws.nesdev.org
One of the things the platform could really use is a music driver/tracker - converted VGM files have filesize and technical issues. As such, understanding that my time available to work on a niche homebrew toolchain is limited, I've been considering adapting hUGEDriver/hUGETracker to the WonderSwan as part of my toolchain work. The reasoning behind such a choice is:
(a) The tracker in question has very permissive licensing, which I hope to retain.
(b) hUGEDriver is a popular design in the GB homebrew game development space, though this is probably in part due to the availability of an actual frontend...
(c) The GB and Swan share a lot of similar audio concepts. This means most of the frontend GUI code can be reused or easily adapted.
(d) Any frontend improvements can trickle back into upstream and help the larger GB community, which is a cool side benefit.
However, I can't do this alone - I'm a coder, hardly a musician (though I'd like to learn more about composing one day)... To borrow a term, I need a "product owner" of sorts - someone who has experience with chiptune creation from the musician side of things (especially across a range of platforms) and is willing to:
(a) answer annoying questions about their development needs, particularly in terms of the driver's capabilities and performance compromises,
(b) hopefully actually use the thing so I can see how well it can sing!
I'm in Poland, so a GMT+1-2 timezone. I speak English and Polish, but I don't mind with working from people around the world - as consulting work, I expect it to be highly asynchronous. No deadlines, as I'm not doing this with a specific demo or party in mind.
To provide some context: the WonderSwan's sound hardware is:
- four channels, mixed digitally at 24,000 Hz in 10-bit stereo (8-bit mono for internal speaker output),
- 15 volume steps, independently controlled across the left and right channel,
- all four channels can be used to play 32x4-bit wavetable samples,
- channel 2 can optionally be used to play 8-bit digital PCM audio instead of wavetable (but this would be a post-MVP feature for various reasons),
- channel 3 can do frequency sweeps in hardware,
- channel 4 can optionally be used to play LFSR-generated noise instead of wavetable.
For the curious, technical/programming documentation is available here: ws.nesdev.org