Author Topic: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!  (Read 62955 times)

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Offline Collector

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #15 on: October 22, 2012, 02:21:24 PM »
The audio files are simply renamed to the .sciAudio extension. Look inside the ".con" files to see if it is calling the right name of the audio files. If you do not have a naming mismatch, perhaps iTunes is converting to some odd proprietary version of MP3. Try using Lame to convert to MP3. Munt (included with the SCI Sound Utilities) can convert MIDI to WAV.
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Offline gumby

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #16 on: October 22, 2012, 06:56:58 PM »
Sounds like you are doing everything correctly to me Doan.  It does sound like iTunes is creating incompatible files.

You are right, you just rename the file extention to .sciAudio.  Note that this only works with MP3s.  If you want to use WAVs, you'll need to keep them with the .WAV extension.  It should also work with .MP3 file extensions too.  I just checked the code again to make sure.  Oh, and I just found out that AIFF files will work too (though I haven't tested them) - but need to remain with AIFF as the extension.

I'd recommend downloading a new MP3s off the internet & seeing if those work okay for you, at least to eliminate iTunes as being the culprit.

Oh, yeah and check the sciAudio.log file & verify that you can see it at least attempting to play the file.  If you'd like, I can take a look at it if you post it here.
« Last Edit: October 22, 2012, 07:05:34 PM by gumby »
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Offline Collector

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #17 on: October 23, 2012, 03:17:37 AM »
I could add LAME to the Sound Utilities while incorporating sciAudio it, as well. I am not sure that a MIDI to WAV function is really that needed as MIDI can just be added by converting it to a SOUND resource via Soundbox.
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Offline Doan Sephim

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #18 on: October 23, 2012, 08:12:52 AM »
I haven't tinkered in a little bit, because I have been very busy. I do want to thank both of you for troubleshooting with me on this.

Also, I wanted to convert the midi's and use sciAudio for them because I've been getting some weird audio problems using the sound resources and I thought this may allow me to bypass them.

Offline Collector

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #19 on: October 23, 2012, 06:43:26 PM »
I wanted to convert the midi's and use sciAudio for them because I've been getting some weird audio problems using the sound resources and I thought this may allow me to bypass them.
Have you been selecting tracks in Soundbox to be used with your selected driver? You should not use Roland without having Roland music that you are using, otherwise the SOUND resource will sound weird, especially without a real MT-32 or at least Munt. BTW, Munt is included with the Sound Utilities, but you still need to track down the ROMs.
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Offline Doan Sephim

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #20 on: October 27, 2012, 01:20:53 PM »
I feel pretty stupid now! I just got a few minutes to tinker around some more and I just entered things in wrong. I kept compiling with the .sciAudio extension for mp3 and wav files. When I simply compiled the script as .mp3 and .wav instead of .sciAudio, everything worked perfectly.

Sometimes you just gotta be humble and admit to being an idiot  ;D Thanks for the awesome new program and all the help you have given me in making it work!

Offline Collector

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #21 on: October 27, 2012, 03:25:10 PM »
We are all allowed the occasional brain fart.
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Offline gumby

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #22 on: October 27, 2012, 08:04:48 PM »
That's awesome Doan!  I'm glad it's working for you now.  Are you updating one of your previously released games with audio, or is this a new endeavor?
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Offline Doan Sephim

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #23 on: October 30, 2012, 07:28:28 PM »
Not updating and not something new, but still tinkering around on Betrayed Alliance from 2007 or 2008. It's been so long I can't even remember when I started working on it!

Offline Cloudee1

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #24 on: August 22, 2014, 12:44:35 AM »
Finally getting a chance to play with this. Pretty cool indeed. I am going to have to step the game up just to match the music. I have pulled out Adobe auditions and did some pretty heavy cutting and pasting, but here is the source of my first in game mp3,  VG intro song and it's working.

I am thinking about generating a small mp3 of silence, and then when the player quits the game, making a call to stop the other music and play it instead. It would eliminate the music playing on after the window has closed, or it would at least give that illusion. Granted this would only work for proper exits and not force closes, but that's still something. Any body have any other thoughts on this one, it really bugs me when the music plays on after the game has closed. I realize the cause, the mp3 playing program doesn't know yet that the game is closed, just trying to think of ways to fake it.

Collector, what is the easiest way to turn the automatic backups off on this Run.exe. Was there a checkbox that I missed or something. For now I have just gone ahead and changed the executable name in the game.ini file to use the dosbox batch file. That works around the run.exe and still seems to pump out the mp3 sounds just fine.
« Last Edit: August 22, 2014, 12:57:12 AM by Cloudee1 »
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Offline gumby

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #25 on: August 22, 2014, 09:27:15 AM »
Yeah, I guess I didn't put create a command to 'stop all currently playing files' - an equivalent to the 'playx' command, something like 'stopx'.

Cloudee, your proposed workaround should work just fine, good idea.
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Offline Collector

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #26 on: August 22, 2014, 11:44:16 AM »
The RUN with backup was just an experiment. I wrote it as an answer to prevent the corruption on run, but that does not seem to be a problem with DOSBox. The current version does not make backups. You must have an older version. The attached version does not backup. I could do a version that can optionally backup, if anyone wants.
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Offline Cloudee1

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #27 on: August 25, 2014, 08:59:19 PM »
Collector, where can I find the dosbox for sciaudio installer with the non backup version of run.

Also, how hard would it be to tweak the configure file before it comes out of the installer so that the aspect ratio is right.

It's not that hard to edit it manually, but when someone else downloads the game and installs it, it would be nice if they didn't have to go in and change the config file to get it to come out looking the way I drew it.

For example, here is a screenshot with the proper resolution vs straight out of installer...
vs

Here is what I would like the conf file to generate which gives the proper resolution:

Code: [Select]
[sdl]
output= overlay
fullresolution= 0x0
windowresolution= normal
fullscreen= false
autolock= false

[dosbox]
machine= svga_s3
captures= .

[render]
aspect= false
scaler= normal1x

[cpu]
core= normal
cycles= 10000

[autoexec]
cls
@ECHO OFF
mount c .
c:
cd \
SCIV.EXE
exit

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Offline Collector

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #28 on: August 26, 2014, 02:06:21 PM »
Did you look on the Wiki? I don't remember what is on there. If not, I'll have to look around for the full package. If I can't find it, I'll have to rebuild it.

Actually, SCI was designed to have a 4:3 aspect ratio. The reason that on modern monitors the image looks stretched is because the shape of the pixels of a modern monitor are shorter than they were in the old DOS days. This has added scan lines to the monitor, which gives greater resolution. This change occurred with the introduction of VESA/SVGA. However, it made the old games with the same number of scan lines designed for the old monitors unnaturally stretched since the lines are thinner. That is the reason that aspect correction was added to DOSBox.

As to fan games, what aspect is correct, of course will be what ever the graphics were designed for. But the designer should remember that on most monitors that when using full screen, DOSBox will stretch it to 4:3 anyway. Some monitors/graphics card drivers will allow the user to stretch the screen to fill, but not all and most users will not want to bother to set it for individual games. I would have to rewrite the config tool to add aspect correction selection. The one for the run tool is essentially the same one that I had already written for my SCI0 installers for official games.

On a side note, I noticed that you have "scaler= normal1x", which is an invalid entry. That will give you normal2x since DOSBox ignores invalid entries and fall back on its defaults. If you really want to have 1:1 scaling use "scaler= none", but true 300x220 and 300/200  will look like thumbnails these days.
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Offline Cloudee1

Re: sciAudio - a new way to put sound in your games!
« Reply #29 on: August 26, 2014, 02:45:51 PM »
Yeah, I have noticed that the normal1x didn't actually accomplish 1 to 1. But since everything seemed to work, I never went back and changed it.

I may just go ahead and write my own little installer. Not one that does everything that yours does, but one that just rewrites or generates the conf file, and the batch file to point to dosbox.

Then instead of cleaning up the dosbox from my game before release, just include the new installer to write the settings that I am forcing upon them.
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