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Vitaly Novichkov edited this page Nov 19, 2023 · 16 revisions

game-music-emu

game-music-emu is a collection of audio emulators for assorted video game console hardware. It was originally developed by Blargg and used as the basis for several other software products before being converted into a library. It was then fixed to build on additional platforms and is used to support audio plugins for other libraries, such as GStreamer and FFmpeg.

Latest Release

The latest release is version 0.6.3, which includes a couple of years' worth of feature changes and bugfixes.

Source

The last released tarball (for version 0.6.3) is available from the Releases page.

  • Michael Pyne, 2020-02-24

Building game-music-emu

You'll need at least CMake version 3.0.

Then you'll need to do something like this: (note these are Linux/UNIX instructions. Although CMake should work on any other operating system):

Linux/UNIX

#!sh
$ tar xjvf game-music-emu-0.6.3.tar.bz2
$ cd game-music-emu-0.6.3
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local # See below for more options
$ make && sudo make install

  • The cmake ../ part is to run CMake, passing the parent directory (../) as the source directory.
  • -D for CMake begins a definition, so -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local sets the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX (where CMake installs to) to /usr/local. You can change this to be anywhere you'd like to install game-music-emu.
  • Compiling in only certain game music emulators is supported. By default, all available types are compiled in. You can remove a type by passing -DUSE_GME_type=FALSE on the command line when running CMake. Make sure to pass more than one if you have more than one type to remove. The valid options are listed below:

Emulator types

Emulator type CMake option
Spectrum ZX -DUSE_GME_AY=0
Game Boy -DUSE_GME_GBS=0
Sega Genesis -DUSE_GME_GYM=0
NEC PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 -DUSE_GME_HES=0
MSX / Other Z80 -DUSE_GME_KSS=0
NES -DUSE_GME_NSF=0
NES Extended support -DUSE_GME_NSFE=0
Atari SAP -DUSE_GME_SAP=0
SNES -DUSE_GME_SPC=0
Sega VGM/VGZ -DUSE_GME_VGM=0

Note that some emulator code is shared. For instance the audio processing code used by Spectrum ZX happened to also be used by PC Engine, so if you select PC Engine and disable Spectrum ZX, you may notice a bit of code still being used, but this is not an error.

Other CMake flags

Feature CMake option
SPC isolated echo buffer -DGME_SPC_ISOLATED_ECHO_BUFFER=ON (off by default)
MAME YM2612 emulator (VGM/VGZ) (GPL licensed) -DGME_YM2612_EMU=MAME
GENS YM2612 emulator (VGM/VGZ) -DGME_YM2612_EMU=GENS
"Nuked" YM2612 emulator (VGM/VGZ) -DGME_YM2612_EMU=Nuked
Build framework instead of a dylib (macOS only) -DBUILD_FRAMEWORK=ON (off by default)
Enable undefined behavior runtime error checker -DENABLE_UBSAN=ON (off by default)
Build static library -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF (on by default)

Detecting conditionally compiled emulators

If you're a developer using libgme the only public API is the one defined in gme/gme.h

This API includes a gme_type_list() function, which you must call at runtime. It returns a NULL-terminated list of available types (alternately, you can simply try to play a file and allow libgme to fail if it doesn't support it).

Testing

To test the library, you can use the included (and very simple) GUI player application (which requires libSDL) in the player/ directory. It is not built by default, but you can cd to the game-music-emu/build/player directory and run make from there after you've already run CMake.

From there just run ./player /path/to/file on any supported file type.

Bindings

There are unofficial Rust-based bindings to game-music-emu. See https://github.com/JayPavlina/Game-Music-Emu-Rust

Contact

If you have issues building you can contact Vitaly Novichkov at admin at wohlnet ru, or Michael Pyne at mpyne at kde org.

Old Locations

game-music-emu first time moved to Bitbucket in 2015 since the old Google Code repository was closed down. Blargg (the original author) no longer had time to maintain the code, so it was kept on life support by Michael Pyne.

He then ran out of time to maintain the code and so after a long time had passed, game-music-emu was moved to GitHub with the help of Vitaly Novichkov to continue development at a more convenient place for the community.

Contributions Welcome

If you're interested in continuing development, maintenance, testing or other work, please get in touch! We will continue to provide security and other minor fixes as we can in the meantime.