this is an email about sound support for the/a win32 port of simcoupe. i think it was simon cooke who was talking about it, but i've since unnecessarily trashed loads of email so now i can't be sure anyone without an interest in this should probably look away now. it's basically a request for reaffirmation, guidance and warm (if wary) confidence.
i've done the algo's, i know they all work. i've got loads of classes, i create a new thread to handle the actual sound generation using the windows multimedia api, i'm linking to the multithreaded dlls... is there anything else i should know? i've not got it working yet only because i've not got it finished yet, and parts of this are sortof new territory for me. but i know what i'm doing and i see no reason why it won't be completed in a matter of days (save for debugging, perhaps, and moving to edinburgh on wednesday) i have my class, CSAASound, which is the only class exported in the dll. (the sound support is in the form of a dll, i'm not sure i mentioned that, but it only made sense to do it that way). it creates the background thread itself. is there anything i should know about exporting c++ classes from a dll (it's not something i've ever tried before). i heard something about .def files and using decorated names which are compiler specific, which i didn't feel too happy about (i'm using visual c++ 5 pro edition, and from what i gather, the author of the emulator will have to be using the same compiler or else they won't be able to link to my dll) - or else i could avoid using a .def file and instead use declspec(dllexport), and risk the possibility of sound support not working if (or when) i release an updated version of my sound dll and are there any forseeable problems with me creating a thread from inside a function (in a class in a dll) which is going to be called from another thread? ( i don't think there are, but as i said, this is new territory ). either way, i'll knock up a small test driver using visual basic or something (can't be bothered with mfc right now) . not ever actually written any vb code that accessed vc classes in a seperate .dll ... but it can't be too hard, right? anyone help / know what i'm talking about / care ? CSAASound class header file available on request. -- Dave sound emulation .dll for win32 port of simcoupe will feature (when finished): 11025, 22050, 44100, 8/16bit, mono/stereo support, optional filtering (two-pole butterworth band-pass filter to generate the unmistakeably crappy low-frequency response of a real SAA-1099 - but a bit of a cpu-stealer), pretty much spot-on sound generation including full envelope control (incl. external clocking as well as emulation of the undocumented volume level resolution drop from 4 bits to 3 when using envelopes), noise generation, offset generation when using envelope controls (meaning samples are supported - emulated mod player anyone?) and even glitching when sending octave/tone data in the wrong order. current status: most of the above is in place in an untested-don't-know-if-it-all-works-together sort of way. still to do: tweaking of the filter parameters; completion of the supported modes (only 11025/mono/8,16 in place at the moment). verifiably complete: algorithms have been tested 'off-line' using non-realtime code worst-case scenario: code is too inefficient to fill sample buffers faster than the sound device uses them. probability: low
