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Converting NSF to VGM?

Technical discussion about the VGM format, and all the software you need to handle VGM files.

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  • octorian Offline
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  • Joined: 2018-04-28, 18:14:49

Converting NSF to VGM?

Post by octorian »

Among the NES/chiptune community, both NSF and VGM seem to be competing formats. While a lot is available in VGM, there's quite a bit more that is only available as NSF.

I'm currently working on a hardware player, where VGM is a very natural fit. (I literally just "replay" the VGM data to the RP2A03 registers and it works.) However, I'd love to be able to play existing content that is only posted in NSF.

For those who may not be familiar, NSF is essentially a rip of the 6502 assembler instructions used to play the music. (while VGM is the resulting register writes) So the only way to "play" an NSF file is to actually emulate an NES CPU.

So are there any existing tools that can actually convert an NSF file into a VGM file? I'm thinking something like an emulator with both NSF playback and VGM logging support.

(Right now, I've been capturing register sequences for NSF-only sound effects by hacking Mednafen's code to basically printf() APU register writes, but going from that to an actual VGM output file is quite a bit more work.)
  • ctr Offline
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  • Joined: 2013-07-17, 23:32:39

Post by ctr »

  • octorian Offline
  • Posts: 7
  • Joined: 2018-04-28, 18:14:49

Post by octorian »

Thanks. Added a post to that thread. (Seems that the only thing that's completely non-obvious about NEZplay++ is how to actually use it to log VGM data. Hopefully someone over there can help.)
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