【DS】Etrian Odyssey III - The First Campaign - GBA Cover【Furnace Tracker】

So this is Furnace Tracker huh? I've been told so much about it...
What I hadn't been told is that I could literally add generic PCM channels of any bit depth and sample rate I wanted! Pair a few of those with the GB soundchip and guess what? Accurate GBA audio! This is like, a dream come true right here, I've LITERALLY Been Asking For This For YEARS!!

So what I'm doing here is simulating a VERY Simple software mixing method where the two GBA direct audio channels are acting as a single stereo output, and I'm halving their volume twice so that I can fit in 4 stereo channels at 6 bit depth and 32 khz, which is the GBA's default sample rate (although some games use a lower sample rate to save up on CPU resources, but some other games go above and beyond and use a higher one!) Now, I'm aware there ARE ways to squeeze in more quality out of the GBA's Direct Audio, but I'm not entirely sure how to go about doing that, and I didn't wanna overcomplicate things here... I don't think it's really that necessary in this case...

Pair that with the GB's 4 sound channels and I get 7 voices and a Noise channel, which is pretty good! And if I crunch it down even further to 5 bit depth, I get 8 sample channels, which adds up to 11 voices and a noise channel, which is fantastic even with the sacrifice in quality! I didn't think that was necessary here though, so I stuck with 4 sample channels at a higher quality...

Now we just need a homebrew sound driver that takes advantage of this, cuz like, from what I can tell, EVERY sound driver currently available for use in GBA homebrew games uses ONLY the Direct Audio, or the GB soundchip, not both, but you see, the true magic of the GBA's sound hardware IS Precisely That It Can Use Both At Once! It's why I wanted to make something for it so much in the first place!! I frickin' LOVE how the crunchy samples and the GB sounds just go SO Well Together!

Oh and, yes, I made this light mode with pink accents colour scheme for the tracker, the default colour scheme literally hurt my eyes, I was having some crazy difficulty reading anything, but after I took the time to make my own colour scheme it was just SOOOOOOOO Much Better!

As for the song itself, I've ripped all the samples I used from the actual game, though I'm only using a single sample per instrument for the sake of simplicity, I mean, it sounds plenty good enough if you ask me... I'm playing the kicks, snares and toms on sample channel 1, the hi-hats and cymbals on the GB noise channel, the bass on the GB DAC (Wavetable) channel, the harmonic support on the two pulse channels, and any other melodic stuff is playing on the 3 remaining sample channels. The percussion is not a 1:1 recreation of the original, it kinda couldn't be anyway, and that'd have been just too frustrating to transcribe, so I settled for an approximation I deemed good enough, and I also left out a few things I deemed unnecessary, mostly just really quiet guitars playing the same notes as the bass, they're hardly even audible in the actual game so...

Anyway, I guess I should also address the hiatus... Sigh... Lemme just say... This isn't what I wanna be doing with my life... I don't wanna be "the girl who makes the PCE and GB covers" forever... I wanna make something entirely my own... I'm just struggling with it so much for a myriad of reasons, ranging from both physical and mental health issues, to working on other people's games for the past 3 years, on top of the multiple projects of my own that are concurrently in the works...

Point is... Don't expect these... But I can still post one like this on occasion, in fact, I already got another one done, it doesn't sound as good as this though, but I should post when I manage to get a proper video editor working on this PC, I used frickin' Blender for this one, it Suuuuuuucked, but everything else I try is either crashing on startup or at random, or it sucks even worse than Blender at video editing... Sigh... I miss Windows 7...

Welp... Das' it... Go homebrew your 3DSes, Nintendo doesn't want your money.