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Muting audio

Posted: October 15th, 2020, 8:26 pm
by Norbert
I generally start apoplexy with -n (--noaudio) to make it not play sound effects.
One reason is that it allows me to better hear music I'm listening to while working.
I would be nice if apoplexy, when started this way, would also mute all game audio (sound effects and music) when playtesting.
Of PoP1 for DOS, PoP2 for DOS, PoP1 for SNES, and when running SDLPoP and MININIM.
But accomplishing this appears to be surprisingly difficult.
PoP1 for DOS has Ctrl-S, which does not work for 1.0.
PoP2 for DOS has command-line options NoLoadSound and NoSounds.
PoP1 for SNES has nothing, I think.
I don't think there's an option to redirect audio to NUL (Windows) or /dev/null (Linux) either.
So, I think maybe I need to give up on the idea of having apoplexy mute game audio...
Or can certain hex edits save the day?

Re: Muting audio

Posted: October 18th, 2020, 10:55 pm
by David
Norbert wrote: October 15th, 2020, 8:26 pm I generally start apoplexy with -n (--noaudio) to make it not play sound effects.
One reason is that it allows me to better hear music I'm listening to while working.
I would be nice if apoplexy, when started this way, would also mute all game audio (sound effects and music) when playtesting.
Of PoP1 for DOS, PoP2 for DOS, PoP1 for SNES, and when running SDLPoP and MININIM.
You could mute the emulators instead of the games.
For DOS you could mute DOSBox, with the nosound option in dosbox.conf.
For SNES you could mute ZSNES, with the soundon option in zsnesw.cfg.

Now, if you want to integrate this into Apoplexy, editing the text files from C might not be easy to do. (You could use sed...)
So I looked into the docs of the emulators to see if there is some other way.

ZSNES has the -ds command line option to disable sound output.
With DOSBox you can use this command line option: -c "mixer master 0"
Snes9X has a -mute option, but it works only in 1.51, not in 1.53 or 1.60. (bug?)

For MININIM use: --sound=false
SDLPoP doesn't have an option for this, but I could add one.

Re: Muting audio

Posted: October 19th, 2020, 12:40 am
by Norbert
David wrote: October 18th, 2020, 10:55 pmYou could mute the emulators instead of the games.
Oh, wow, why didn't I think of looking into that...
Thanks. :)

Re: Muting audio

Posted: October 19th, 2020, 3:19 pm
by dmitrys
David wrote: October 18th, 2020, 10:55 pm SDLPoP doesn't have an option for this, but I could add one.
SDLPoP also has an issue where music is being played in cut scenes when the sound is off in the game.

Re: Muting audio

Posted: October 24th, 2020, 11:38 am
by David
dmitrys wrote: October 19th, 2020, 3:19 pm SDLPoP also has an issue where music is being played in cut scenes when the sound is off in the game.
Thank you for reporting, I didn't know about this.
(This tells a lot about how much I don't use SDLPoP nowadays...)

I fixed it now: https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP/commit/ ... b4a218eb82

Re: Muting audio

Posted: November 11th, 2020, 5:30 pm
by atrueprincefanfrom18
Even the newly added feature of ` fast forwarding the game, also affects how cutscenes are shown. The music is not fast forwarded, so only after the music is played the game starts. And if the graphics finish early, a black screen is shown (from my brain memory. I don't really remember clearly).