NSF
Nintendo Sound Format | |||||
Developer: | Kevin Horton | ||||
Header: | {{{Header}}} | [[Category: Formats With {{{Header}}} Headers]]||||
Content: | {{{Content}}} | [[Category: Formats With {{{Content}}} Content]]||||
Instruments: | {{{Instruments}}} | [[Category: Formats With {{{Instruments}}} Instruments]]||||
Target Output
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Released: | ? | ||||
First Game: | ? | ||||
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The Nintendo Sound Format (NSF) is a container format, designed by Kevin Horton, that holds audio code ripped from the ROMs of games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES had a pretty good sound engine for its time supporting 2 pulse-waves, 1 triangle wave, a noise channel, and DPCM channel which is a raw 7 bit counter raw sample playback. However, some games also included their own sound chips to improve their audio quality. The NSF files store the machine code that is sent to the audio chips which makes ripping the audio data a difficult process.
In the days of the NES, the audio composers were limited to only a few instruments at a time, and each instrument ended up sounding like a weak synthesizer. Once the composers finished their song, an audio programmer would convert the song into assembly code that would be compiled into machine code for the NES audio chip. This was a difficult task and although the sound was primitive, a capable artist was able to make it sound impressive.
In order to rip audio data from an NES ROM, you must read through the machine code of the ROM and extract the information that gets sent to audio chip. It's a very tedious process.
There is also an extremely rare version of NSF called NSF2 which are NSF files which are used when a game uses certain features of the sound chip or NES that the regular NSF format cannot support. Currently, no players support this program and only the emulator Nintendulator supports little features of it. So far, the only NSF to use NSF2 features is Rollerblade Racer.
The Not So, Fatso! Winamp plugin is suggested for optimal sound and accuracy of NSF files.
Contents
Players
- Festalon - Winamp
- Game Emu Player - foobar2000
- NEZ Plug - Winamp
- Nosefart - CL-amp, Linux, DOS, Winamp, XMMS
- Not So, Fatso! - Winamp
- NSFPlay - Winamp, Windows
Converters
- FamiTracker - Windows
Games
Links
- famitracker.com/wiki/index.php?title=List_of_NSF_players - List of popular players.
- gilgalad.arc-nova.org/NSF-Archive - Gil Galad's NSF Archive.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Sound_Format - Wikipedia.
- wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/NSF - Technical document.
- zophar.net/music/nsf.html - Zophar's NSF archive (out of date).