spcplayer patch for libao

I've been intro retro gaming lately, and one of the interesting aspects of the retro gaming is their music; in particular, the music in their original format.

One of those formats is SPC. There are plenty of players for Windows (mostly plugins to popular music players), but standalone players for Linux are few and far between.

There is this player called AudioOverload but it is closed-source and output only to /dev/dsp. It does have a nice interface and supports many different video game formats, not only SPC.

The older version of gstreamer (0.10 branch) has a decoder in their 'bad plugins' collection called "GstNsfDec" which apparently can be used to decode SPC file (I haven't tested) - but do I really want to install the entire train of old gstreamer libs just to do that?

Then I found this vspcplay is an SDL-based player which is really nice and full featured; unfortunately the emulation isn't accurate; it sounds different from what I heard in the game and it eats 100% of one of my CPU core when running it.

Finally I found this one: SPC-PLAYER, a CLI player for SPC but unfortunately like AudioOverload it also outputs to /dev/dsp (and other OSS devices).

The problem with outputting to /dev/dsp is that whatever program is outputting the sound takes an exclusive use of the soundcard. I cannot play anything if I have my web brower open and one of its tab is pointing to youtube (even if nothing is being played), because the browser keep the sound access open and this prevents other programs to access /dev/dsp.

The only way to make work nicely is to use ALSA, which comes with built-in mixer (dmix) allowing multiple programs to use the sound card at the same time.

So I've written a simple patch for SPC-PLAYER to use libao, a very nice sound output library that enables us to output to a variety of output devices (ALSA, OSS< Pulse, etc) with exactly the same, simple API. Nice.

Well, if you're interested, you can find the patch in my patches page.

Note that SPC-PLAYER compiles in 32-bit only due to its extensive usage of x86 assembly in its APU emulation.


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EDIT: and just after I spent the effort to create the patch, I found ZXTune which is a full-fledged multi-format chiptune player which includes support for SPC and many other formats! You know, you can't guess by its name alone (ZXTune - it plays only sounds for ZX Spectrum? Come on ...). It's open source and binary is provided, too! Works out of the box and supports the formats I'd love to play. The program comes in GUI flavours (Qt) and CLI, with only minimal dependencies needed (the rest of the libs needed were compiled statically with the binary).

So go ahead and use that instead.


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EDIT: After finding ZX-Tune, JakeSFR informed me that deadbeef music player can also play SPC files.

Interesting. I looked into that, and found that deadbeen uses a library called "game music player", also known as libgme, to do that. And I found out ZXTune uses the same library too!

The library also has a simple "sample player" which uses SDL for output and hence is not affected by the "OSS problem".

You can get libgme from here.

That probably explains why nobody bothers to patch SPC-PLAYER, but that's okay. At least now I know how to use libao for my future projects

Posted on 2 Sep 2020, 02:05 - Categories: Linux
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