quote:Original post by dede
You can use zlib to compress your wav in a zip, then zlib again to decompress and load during game play. It will still be a wav file, but it will be smaller.

If you have a, for example, for minute song, and that it is about 40 someodd number of megabytes, does that mean that you get to load 40 megabytes worth of wav in memory?



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quote:If you have a, for example, for minute song, and that it is about 40 someodd number of megabytes, does that mean that you get to load 40 megabytes worth of wav in memory?

yes that is correct. Usually most game music is a loop of a short tune. Think back to those old nes games with the short midi loops. Great, now that Mario Bros music is stuck in my head again!!! I haven''t really looked into using midi for background music mainly because it is easier for me to plug my guitar or keyboard into my sound cards audio in and record as a wav, but I know midi files are really small and I think they use very little processing time, but that may be an option you might want to look into.


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quote:Original post by ageny6

quote:Original post by dede
You can use zlib to compress your wav in a zip, then zlib again to decompress and load during game play. It will still be a wav file, but it will be smaller.

If you have a, for example, for minute song, and that it is about 40 someodd number of megabytes, does that mean that you get to load 40 megabytes worth of wav in memory?

Depends. You can get away with double buffering your music.

Here''s are blocks of music
ABCDEF...

Load AB, play A, get B ready. When the A stops, start B. Erase A and load C. Repeat til end, and restart. That is a way you can get around 40 megs. zlib allows you to load things in blocks, you''ll just have to generate header information, which would be faster than decompressing a mp3.

If you do it in another thread(i.e. a mult-threaded application), it probably wouldn''t be too much of a preformance hit. You''ll have to play with how big your block size is too, you want it to be long enough to have enough time to get the next one, but not too big.


You can also just not care, since Windows has 2 gigs of virtual memory to play with. You''ll just have a very long loading time!


If you talking about 40 megs, I''d just use either .mp3 or .ogg. DirectShow has mp3 decompression, and .ogg has its own decompression for free. I''d go with mp3, since it is slightly more mature at this time, so it decompresses a bit faster.

~~~~~
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quote:I had no Idea NES uses MIDI.

sure, its not like the game cartriges could hold data the size of a wave file!

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So its like pre midi technology. Pretty neat

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