annotate src/console/notes.txt @ 3158:8b97f9560dc3

More clean-up of roll-up code (should fix bug #37; if not, it's a WM problem).

Audacious Console Game Music Driver
-----------------------------------
Contact: Shay Green <hotpop.com@blargg>

Notes
-----
- This is a fairly rough version. I'm sending it so we can decide more
concretely on the desired features. I don't have Unix (or even Mac OS X)
so I've only tested this lightly with a quick framework I wrote to
simulate the Audacious environment (as best as I could determine based
on the limited documentation).

- The most significant missing feature is a way to select the track
number of multi-track formats (NSF, NSFE, GBS). I've implemented
internal support for this and marked the places where the track number
is needed from an external source.

- Seeking should be tested carefully. It might be too slow for some
formats.

- Currently text fields are treated as they are already in UTF-8 format
(which they aren't), but they should probably be converted from Windows
charset to UTF-8. VGM files have 16-bit chars in an unknown encoding,
currently just truncated to 8-bits.

- Errors in Audacious_Driver.cpp are checked and generally result in
exit of the current operation and no overall effect. Information about
the cause of the error is consistently lost, so it would be difficult to
switch over to a model of actually reporting the error so the user can
know about it and take useful action.

- Each track may contain any of the following: preferred play length,
intro length, loop length. If play length is present, it is used as the
track time. If not present, the default play length from the config file
is used. A more sophisticated algorithm could be used that takes into
account the loop length.

- File opening and reading has been significantly minimized. Bytes read
for file identification are preserved for when the rest of header is
read. When playing a track, file information is obtained using
already-loaded data in the emulator, eliminating extra reading.


Change Log
----------
- Marked things to be addressed with "// to do:" comments

- Updated to Game_Music_Emu 0.3.0 and eliminated unnecessary source
files

- Eliminated Audacious_Driver.h since it served no purpose

- Added support for NSFE files

- Added Vfs_File, a wrapper for the vfs_* file functions. This allows
all the emulators to access files in this manner.

- Updated Makefile.am but didn't add line to link with zlib

- Added fading at end of tracks

- Added end-of-track silence detection for tracks without timing
information. Stops track when 6 seconds of silence have passed, but
looks ahead so that the user only experiences about 1 second of silence
before the track ends.

- Added beginning-of-track silence removal, as some tracks have many
seconds of silence (Zelda Link's Awakening.gbs track 61 has 20 seconds
of silence, making you think it's not a music track without this
feature).


To Do
-----
- Separate track info handling from Audacious_Driver.cpp, since the
current complexity is a good source of bugs