Static usage preventing multiple NSFPlayer instances

[meckzqz]

Hello! You may not remember me, but we used to chat many years ago while I was using your C# Mega Man Engine project (my project was called Mega Man Time Tangent). Great idea for making a standalone version of this NSF player, and from my profiling in Unity the performance is excellent!

Currently, due to critical components of emulation depending on static classes/fields (Nes.Cpu, Apu.Mixer, etc.), attempting to have multiple NSFPlayer instances playing simultaneously (say, for synthesizing sound effects and music) results in undefined behaviour and crashes. On my end, I've hacked in some dependency injection where necessary (for example, Board now has a local reference to an Nes), and while simultaneous playback now works, the solution doesn't seem ideal.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on a proper solution to this limitation of the library, and would be happy to implement the fix myself and create a pull request.

Thanks for the library!

[Tesserex]

Hey there! Yes I do remember you! I did notice this issue myself while integrating this library into the engine. I was told by some people more knowledgeable about nsf and the nes hardware that it should be possible to play sfx along with music in the same instance by just starting a new track in top, and it all works out. I only sort of got it working - there was some issue where it would repeat the sfx forever and I couldn't figure out how to tell it to stop, even when I tried playing an empty track afterward. Obviously the original NES had some way to do it, since it only has one APU, but I haven't figured it out yet. If you did go down the route of using two players, you'll have to simulate the effect of muting music channels that the sfx are using.

[meckzqz]

Thanks for the quick response! Makes total sense that playing multiple tracks with a single player is something that could be supported, and that you've already taken a crack at implementing it.

I did realize that some kind of solution would be needed to simulate the channel muting effect you're describing, albeit not the most necessary thing for a suitably faux-retro project. In any case, I've gone down the route of writing a light wrapper around libgme for now in lieu of some unrelated issues regarding bankswitching, though I do still love the idea of having everything self-contained and living in .NET land.

Thanks again, and best of luck if you decide to continue maintaining this library!

[sndcode]

Nice to see you still active! We also chatted about the CME in facebook like 10-15 years ago :D
Good job on this lib!