8363 | A game audio blog

The hardest part of this release was fixing the installation experience. Basically, the Setup Projects in Visual Studio 2005 make certain things very easy, and certain things (like removing the program folder on uninstall, or ensuring the files get updated when a newer version is installed) seemingly impossible.

Fortunately I came across this discussion on stackoverflow.com which led me to Inno Setup. Inno is incredibly easy to use--after hours of wrangling with Setup Projects, I was up and running with Inno in about 20 minutes.

Plus, there is no more uninstall/delete hassle like in previous versions. Existing users just run the install and everything should get updated just fine.

The main update besides a better install is a vastly improved NSF export, which is much more faithful to what you hear in the tracker.

There are some new example songs as well.

Have fun...

Download NesTracker version 1.1

After much hard work, NesTracker version 1.0 is finally available.

Download the latest version

There are a bunch of bug fixes and new features including:

• NSF EXPORT!!! Thanks to Kyle for handling 100% of this feature and his many late nights coding a player and format in 6502.
• Selectable latency. If you are using Vista, you may need to go to 200 ms... for some reason, Vista's drawing seems much slower than XP's.
• Some UI enhancements
• Cleaner installation experience (though there is still work to be done--see below)

NOTE ON INSTALLATION - IMPORTANT

If you've installed a previous version of NesTracker, you must do the following:

1. Uninstall NesTracker through Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel
2. Delete the folder c:\Program Files\NesTracker
3. Run NesTracker_Installer.msi

(I hope to remove these steps in the next version, but I am a newbie with Visual Studio deployment projects so bear with me.)

Enjoy!

*** UPDATE - Version 1.0.1 ***

Fixed a bug in the NSF converter that was causing low notes not to play.

This version mostly has bug fixes and a few changes to the UI to make it more IT-like. New features will be coming in the next version.

Grab it here.

Check out the change log for a rundown of the new features. Enjoy!

This has been a pet project of mine for quite some time. It began as a challenge to see if I could write an emulator for the NES sound chip (2A03). After making the emulator, I decided to write some sequencing functionality, and eventually we have a fully-featured tracker that can be used to make NES music from scratch.

Download the NesTracker 0.5 Beta Installer

This program requires the .NET Framework 2.0, which it should check your system for on installation. It also requires the latest version of DirectX.

Here is a video demonstrating a recreation of the Zelda 2 overworld theme:

Download the Zelda 2 Demo Song

I encourage everyone to try this out and post feedback here. Errors especially, but also general usability comments. I have plenty of features planned for the next version, including NSF export (to use your songs on real NES hardware or in an emulator).

[Edit: I have changed the link to point to the latest install file.]

Squarespace has some awesome new styles now, so we're rocking teal. I'll find some time to adjust it a bit since I think the fonts are too small, but so far it's got the look of freshness.

Also freshly updated is my resume.