furnace/doc/7-systems/vrc6.md
2023-09-10 01:44:29 -05:00

1.3 KiB

Konami VRC6

the most popular expansion chip to the Famicom's sound system.

the chip has 2 pulse wave channels and one sawtooth channel. volume register is 4 bit for pulse wave and 6 bit for sawtooth, but sawtooth output is corrupted when volume register value is too high. because this register is actually an 8 bit accumulator, its output may wrap around.

for that reason, the sawtooth channel has its own instrument type. setting volume macro and/or pattern editor volume setting too high (above 42/2A) may distort the waveform.

pulse wave duty cycle is 8-level. it can be ignored and it has potential for DAC at this case: volume register in this mode is DAC output and it can be PCM playback through this mode. Furnace supports this routine for PCM playback, but it consumes a lot of CPU time in real hardware (even if conjunction with VRC6's integrated IRQ timer).

effects

these effects only are effective in the pulse channels.

  • 12xx: set duty cycle. range is 0 to 7.
  • 17xx: toggle LEGACY sample mode.
    • this effect exists only for compatibility reasons! its use is NOT recommented. use Sample type instruments instead.

info

this chip uses the VRC6, VRC6 (saw), and Generic Sample instrument editors.